I was listening to Nicky Campbell's phone-in on Radio 5 Live the other day. A studio guest was explaining the advantages of privatising, well, everything really. Hardly surprising since she was from the Centre for Policy Studies, the "independent centre right think tank". The praises of private medicine were inevitably sung. She implied that your local NHS hospital was a secretive, impenetrable bastion where mistakes were covered up; in the private sector the "marketplace" mentality led to more open practices. This gobsmackingly inaccurate picture is as far from real life as you can get, without actually suggesting that foot-and-mouth disease is best controlled by trucking infected livestock to every farm in the land.

Some years ago, a friend of mine was employed temporarily to nurse the acute ward overnight in a private hospital that started life as a small nursing home. She asked what their procedures were for handling a cardiac arrest on the ward. The Sister regarded her with some surprise and told her their procedures in detail. "We just dial nine nine nine."

If someone's heart stopped, the facilities available were so basic that their only recourse was to shout loudly for an NHS ambulance to come and bail them out.

This happened in the mid-Eighties, and the private hospital concerned was then, as now, endorsed by a leading private medical insurer. You could have your hip replaced, when you wanted, by the consultant of your choice. Unfortunately, what happened afterwards was in the lap of the gods.

"Private medicine leads to error and its concealment."This is the opinionUof Baroness Emma Nicholson, the Liberal Democrat peer and MEP, whose husband Sir Michael Caine died at the King Edward VII Hospital for Officers. Emma Nicholson is convinced that the death was preventable, and would not have occurred if the intensive care unit had been properly staffed, or even if it had a single ICU-trained nurse on duty that night, which it hadn't.

Or you could instead ask the opinion of film finance director Peter Touche. His wife Laura died following complications of childbirth at the Portland Hospital in February 1999. The Court of Appeal recently ruled that the local coroner, Dr Stephen Chan, had been wrong in deciding not to open an inquest into the death. He decided that "natural causes" were to blame. The appeal court judges decided otherwise - that there was a possibility of neglect at the private clinic, and that a full inquest was justified.

Like others within the NHS, I have come across many cases of lack of care in private hospitals which needed sorting out. The young girl bleeding from a perforated uterus inflicted at a private abortion clinic. The elderly man whose heart stopped as he was being anaesthetised for his private hip replacement and was rushed to A&E;, even though he was dead. And most commonly, patients who unexpectedly need the services of a hi-tech ICU after their operation.

Private ICUs are a rare species - not usually up to the standard of publicly-funded ones - and most health insurance plans specifically exclude treatment in ICU. It's too expensive. Of course private patients pay national insurance too, and are entitled to the use of NHS facilities. But try explaining to relatives of an acutely ill patient that the reason there are no more ICU beds, the reason their loved one is being transferred 50 miles across the country, is that the last bed has been taken by a "private" patient. You see my point.

Many private hospitals are registered either as nursing homes, or charities, with accompanying tax benefits (the King Edward VII hospital, having a royal charter, is not registered as either). This exempts it and others from the many regulations found in the NHS, such as the ratio of specially trained ICU staff that must be on every shift, or the regularity with which patients must have their vital signs recorded. While many of the junior doctors employed in the private sector are perfectly competent, working privately as a junior is a dead-end job; it pays well but leads nowhere. Most juniors worth their salt are too tired to moonlight in private hospitals.

The surroundings are certainly nicer than those found in some parts of the NHS; the food and "hotel services" are nicer too. But the idea that you get an automatically higher standard of medical or nursing care however, is false.

The NHS has well-structured machinery to investigate complaints. There are time limits imposed on the process, and outsiders, including lay people, are involved in the more serious cases. There is no investigative system whatever in the private sector. The only redress for the bereaved or injured is to complain to the GMC, or go to law.

Emma Nicholson has been told by the Alan Milburn, the Health Secretary, that his department is responsible only for National Health Service services; private medicine is not their concern.

You no longer have to be rich or have insurance to experience the joys of a private room. The Department of Health - along with the Ministry of Defence - is using private hospitals to speed up patient throughput. The Government seems quite happy to use private healthcare in Accident and Emergency specialist in West Yorkshire.

The writer is an Accident and Emergency specialist in West Yorkshire.