While most of the NHS battles to catch back up with a still-growing backlog of patients waiting for elective treatment, Oxford University Hospitals Foundation Trust is looking instead to expand its private patient business.
In 2019/20 its income from private patients, £8.1m, was less than 1% of its £960m turnover – and according to Healthcare Markets magazine CEO Bruno Holthof is now looking for private hospital operators to help increase this, beginning in the second half of this year.
This is despite the failure of the trust’s attempt in 2019 to launch a central London an “executive diagnostics and screening centre” in partnership in with US-owned Mayo Clinic, which lasted only a few months.
It appears Oxford trust bosses are lured again by hopes of matching the hefty profit margins of Manchester’s Christie NHS Foundation Trust, which claimed to have £13m profit from £48m turnover in a project with US-owned HCA last year, a profit margin significantly higher than most private hospital chains in England.
Full story in The Lowdown, 17 April 2021
