NHS patients urged to pay thousands for private ops instead
FAMILY doctors are being encouraged to recommend private treatments to patients to ease pressure on the NHS.
Knee replacements costing £10,000 and £2,000-per-eye cataract surgery are on the ‘shopping list’ of non- emergency operations being offered.
The treatments are being advertised by private firm Care UK as part of its ‘self-pay’ service, which promises to beat long NHS waiting times.
It sent letters to 300 GP surgeries around Bristol and Wiltshire encouraging them to offer the private treatments.
Doctors are under no obligation, but it has reignited fears the NHS is rationing treatments because of a lack of resources.
Treatments include £9,000 hip replacements, £ 2,000 tonsil removal surgery and sight-saving cataract operations, at NHS hospitals in Emersons Green Bristol, and Devizes, Wiltshire.
NHS patients seeking these operations in the same area face a six to 20-week wait – which is below national standards.
Although the health service was given an extra £2.8billion in the Budget, that was only a third of what NHS executives have asked for.
Some GPs are refusing to advertise the private treatments. Dr David Porteous, of the Fishponds Family Practice in Bristol, said: ‘To see an actual price list is the most blatant bit of marketing around healthcare I can remember … it’s never been as blunt as this, as shameless.
‘It’s part of the wider privatisation, but the more sinister thing is it normalises people paying for the healthcare that is provided free by the NHS, albeit with delays and obstacles.
‘I see that as part of the dismantling of healthcare at the time of need. It’s about removing the expectation of state provision of services.’
Mike Campbell of campaign group Protect Our NHS said: ‘It is totally wrong that hardpressed GPs are now being encouraged to recommend their patients to a private company … when they should be getting their treatments free.
‘More people are having to pay for urgent procedures by dipping into savings or taking out health insurance. For those who can’t pay, waiting lists grow.’
Care UK said it was responding to demand from patients let down by the NHS, adding that many of its treatments are no longer offered by local NHS clinical commissioning groups, such as vasectomies and removing benign lumps.
A spokesman for the company said it was offering a ‘value-formoney alternative to private health insurance and to the much higher prices charged by existing private hospitals’.
A spokesman for the NHS Bristol Clinical Commissioning Group said: ‘We commissioned Care UK to provide a number of planned care treatments on the NHS … As a private provider of healthcare they are able to offer self-pay treatment for patients, which is completely separate from the NHS.’