Alan Milburn, the health secretary, yesterday offered overseas healthcare companies a permanent foothold in the UK market with the promise of profitable long term contracts to treat NHS patients.

After talks in London with representatives of five of the firms, he said that the government was determined to develop a "new sector" that would be radically different from indigenous private health companies.

The core UK business of the foreign firms would be providing free treatment for NHS patients under long term contracts with the NHS, using foreign doctors and nurses to avoid putting pressure on the UK hospital labour market.

Mr Milburn issued a prospectus inviting overseas companies to bid to carry out operations for the NHS. Most of the early work will be done in south-east England where the waiting lists are longest.

The first contracts are likely to be for cataract surgery and orthopaedic work.

The prospectus said: "It is an explicit objective or government health policy to shift towards a greater plurality and diversity in the delivery of elective services ... The NHS will remain the public purchaser of health care, but services will no longer be provided only by traditional public sector NHS providers and will increasingly be driven by patient choice."

The first contracts might run for three years initially. Mr Milburn told the five representatives of groups based in France, Sweden and Germany, that he wanted trail-blazing standards of patient care, use of overseas staff without any poaching from the NHS, and good value for money.

Karen Jennings, Unison national secretary, said: "It is about bringing a market into the NHS which this government said it wanted to end when it was first elected in 1997. Recruiting health teams from other EU member states is unethical."