Steve Barclay offers Scotland and Wales use of England’s private hospitals to cut waiting lists
Not that private hospitals belong to Barclay to offer but still….
Steve Barclay offers Scotland and Wales use of England’s private hospitals to cut waiting lists
Not that private hospitals belong to Barclay to offer but still….
‘Virtual wards are also showing the way forward for hospital care at home, with a growing evidence base showing that virtual wards are a safe and efficient alternative to being in hospital.’
Home treatment? I wonder if they’ll reintroduce the doctor coming and treating you there?
Boganboy,
Round here they occasionally do, but we also have quite a few community nurses that do a lot of the type of nursing that was done in hospitals.
A good friend who live in Buckinghamshire had half his face chopped off because he had cancer and now he’s having lots of reconstruction surgery at St Thomas’s in London. The hospital trained his wife to change dressings and what to look for so he doesn’t have to spend weeks in hospital, with all the attendant dangers from infection and incompetence.
It would be interesting to compare the fully loaded cost of a procedure done in a private hospital for the NHS with the same procedure done in an NHS hospital. Sadly it’s impossible to do as NHS hospitals provides treatment that private ones don’t so they can fiddle the numbers by assigning most of the hospital fixed costs to the NHS only treatments to make the comparable treatments seem cheap.
Thanks BiND. I wish your friend luck.
TBF, the article didn’t offer the private hospitals, it offered English funding to pay for treatment using them.
So yet again, devolution means the barbrians get to vote themselves things at the English expense.
Scottish & Welsh independence cannot come soon enough.
Supposing all hospitals were private, and people could opt to pay into a State insurance scheme or a private insurance scheme, and all the hospitals accepting State insurance patients did so on an agreed tariff of charges and to provide diagnostic procedures and treatments as specified by the State, and private insurance companies agreed their own tariffs and service level with the private hospitals.
This would give competition, and people could decide which scheme best met their needs and their pocket. I wonder if this competition would drive up standards and keep cost and thus prices down? Would the NHS survive the shock of competition?
John B,
You’ve almost described the German and Dutch systems and were often told they’re better on all measure (except the one the left likes to use, equality of access rather than keeping people alive).
Madsen Pirie recently published a good way to get from there to there on the ASI blog:
https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/the-nhs-guarantee-card
When I had my soethingorotherectomy in 2007 it was in a private ward in an NHS hospital and done by NHS staff. How it all fitted I know not, but it worked as a production line for a certain kind of problem. Mostly bowel-related.
I refer to it as that time I was in a theatre and a chinaman and an egyptian came at me with knives.
Isn’t there a trade off between access, cost and quality when it comes to healthcare so you are always going to be making a compromise somewhere
“Isn’t there a trade off between access, cost and quality when it comes to healthcare so you are always going to be making a compromise somewhere”
Oh I don’t know the NHS manages to make no compromises at all – its expensive, hard to access and the care is shit……..
@BniC
Healthcare is always a compromise. The concept of the NHS is great. It’s the execution that is flawed. Whilst the NHS should pay for the treatment I fail to see why they should ever be providing the treatment as privately run hospitals seem to be able to treat sooner, more cheaply and with a better patient outcome.
@AndyF
“privately run hospitals seem to be able to treat sooner, more cheaply and with a better patient outcome.”
That’s because they have complete control over who they treat
Not sure they are cheaper as the NHS seems to pick up any complications if they screw up
@ Starfish
Does that take into account the costs for NHS complications when they screw up?
From https://resolution.nhs.uk/2022/07/20/nhs-resolution-continues-to-drive-down-litigation-annual-report-and-accounts-published-for-2021-22/:
NHS Resolution’s provision at 31 March 2022 increased from £85.2 billion to £128.6 billion.