It’s another autumn, and the private healthcare sector is again attempting to convince journalists and the public that it is booming.
The publicists for the private hospitals are keen to take the stigma out of wealthy people paying up to jump lengthy NHS queues for elective treatment: David Hare, who runs the Independent Healthcare Providers Network (IHPN), has claimed to the Guardian that ‘going private’ is now the ‘new normal’.
But one look at the private sector’s own figures shows that it really isn’t normal at all.
The Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) claims the private hospital sector across the whole of the UK handled 904,000 private admissions in 2023, all of them elective cases, while the NHS in England alone treated over 11 million elective cases as well as 6.5 million emergencies (for which there is no private service available).
Another 445,000 NHS-funded patients further boosted private sector activity – at a cost of £3.5bn. This would give an average cost of £7,800 for each NHS patient treated in a private facility, which is astounding given that a very large proportion of the cases were relatively cheap cataract operations. (The NHS is now paying for more cataract surgery to be carried out by private eye clinics than it performs itself.)
Such high average costs cast even more severe doubts over the affordability of Wes Streeting’s relentlessly vaunted plan to make more use of the private sector to help cut waiting lists.
Full story in The Lowdown, 31st October 2024
