‘Halt private non-urgent operations’

HEALTH chiefs are “profoundly uncomfortable” that non-urgent operations are continuing in private hospitals while the NHS creaks.

They are asking NHS hospitals “not to support” senior medics who do private work in the next month.

A leaked letter from all the medical directors of London’s acute hospital trusts, seen by the Health Service Journal, says: “The second wave of Covid-19 is putting pressures on the service that only a year ago would have been unthinkable.

“In this context, with all but the most urgent elective activity postponed in the NHS in London, it feels profoundly uncomfortable to us that some elective work, that is not time critical, is continuing in the independent sector. We are asking colleagues to think very carefully about the appropriateness of this, and would like colleagues not to support delivery of such work.”

Until August, all London private hospitals had been made available to the NHS in a block booking.