The United Kingdom this week faced its biggest shutdown in the 75-year history of the National Health Service (NHS), the state’s free universal service. Tens of thousands of nurses and nearly 12,000 ambulance workers went on strike demanding better wages and working conditions.
The action comes after years of falling wages, tight budgets and staff shortages that have left the NHS in a state of crisis, with waiting times for treatment at a record high. At the same time, an aging population needs their services more than ever.
This unfortunate mix is fueling a boom in demand for private healthcare from a much wider swath of the UK population – a significant shift for a nation with one of the world’s best-known universal healthcare systems.
“Our providers are telling us that people are turning to the private system, many for the first time, and the main driver of this is the challenge of accessing NHS care,” said David Furness, Policy Director at Independent Healthcare Providers Network, an industry body for private healthcare companies.
At the end of November, a record 7.2 million patients in England were awaiting non-urgent medical treatment on the NHS, known as ‘elective’ care. This covers diagnostic tests and examinations, procedures such as hip and knee replacements, but also heart surgery, cancer treatment and neurosurgery.
More than half of those on the list were waiting up to 18 weeks and around 400,000 patients were waiting more than a year, according to data from NHS England.
To avoid getting on a waiting list, more and more people are paying for their own private medical care or taking out health insurance.
In the second quarter of 2022, the number of patients directly paying for private hospital care increased by 34% compared to the same period in 2019, reaching 67,000, according to the Private Healthcare Information Network, which collects data on private healthcare in the UK. United.
The numbers revealed a 184% jump in the number of people paying privately for hip replacements during this period, a 153% increase in self-paying for knee replacements and a 42% increase in private cataract surgeries.
Increase in private hospitals
To keep up with the growing demand for their services, private healthcare providers are expanding rapidly.
US group Cleveland Clinic plans to open its third UK facility in London later this year, adding to the 184-bed hospital and six-story clinic it opened in the capital in 2021 and 2022 respectively.
HCA Healthcare (HCA), another US group, which has more than 30 facilities in London and Manchester, will open a £100m ($120m) private hospital in Birmingham – the UK’s second-largest city – later this year .
And Spire Healthcare, one of the UK’s largest private hospital groups, is adding new clinics, theaters and beds across the country as it races to meet demand.
CEO Justin Ash estimates that the private healthcare market in the UK has doubled since before the pandemic to 15 million people.
“Our biggest challenge is how we treat the number of patients that come to us,” he told the CNN .
The group plans to develop two new clinics in 2023, which are faster to build than hospitals and designed for procedures that do not require overnight stays – for example, ophthalmology, gynecology and dermatology.
Spire is also investing in primary care services, citing the demand for face-to-face consultations with general practitioners. In December, it acquired The Doctors Clinic Group, a network of 22 private GP practices with a strong presence in central London.
Ash said the appetite for private health care spans a much broader range of ages and incomes than in the past.
“This is not the super-rich. It’s ordinary people who are opting for the private, and that’s a change,” he said.
health insurance on the rise
One such patient is Emma Freeth, a website administrator. She decided to take out private medical insurance after waiting nine months to see an NHS specialist.
“That’s what really triggered it: the idea that I just want to get help when I need it, instead of having to wait and wait and wait,” she told CNN . “If I was in pain or discomfort, that would be a real problem,” she said of her thoughts at the time.
In November, Freeth, 58, and her husband Peter, 55, a photographer, took out personal medical insurance for the first time in their lives.
Their story is mirrored in data from health insurers. Bupa added 150,000 new UK health insurance customers in 2022, while rival VitalityHealth saw a 20% rise in customers last year to over 900,000.
“We expect the growth we have seen in health insurance uptake to continue into 2023,” said Neville Koopowitz, CEO of Vitality UK.
“This is because people are undoubtedly turning to private health care to ensure they have access to high-quality care, quickly, should they become ill,” he added.
The Freeths, who are self-employed, said minimizing time off work with ill health was a major factor in their decision-making, particularly given long waiting times for appointments on the NHS.
According to the Office for National Statistics, a record number of Britons are leaving the workforce due to prolonged illness, a problem partly attributed to long waiting times for NHS treatment.
This is an issue that concerns employers more and more. A recent Savanta survey of more than 1,000 businesses on behalf of the Independent Health Providers Network found that more than half are concerned that increased NHS waiting times could result in long absences by staff or permanent absence from work. work due to illness.
And one in five said they were considering offering private health insurance to their employees in the next year.
Stratified healthcare system
With the NHS estimating that it will take years for waiting times to drop, demand for private healthcare in Britain is likely to continue to grow.
In the longer term, there are questions about whether the NHS is sustainable in its current form, offering free and comprehensive healthcare to all funded solely by tax, particularly against a backdrop of an aging population and strained government finances.
The NHS is already the biggest single item of public spending in Britain, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, with figures from the ONS showing that health spending amounts to around 12% of GDP.
Some experts fear that moving away from a universal NHS will lead to a two-tier health care system, where people with means pay for private care, allowing them to get back to work and resume normal lives more quickly than those who are less affluent. and forced to rely on limited public services.
“The risk is less a sudden privatization and more the emergence of something like the English education system – where the best education is often conditional on ability to pay,” researchers at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a think tank, wrote in a report. last year.
“If this became the new normal, it would worsen overall health and widen inequality,” they added.
But Ash at Spire Healthcare has a less dystopian vision of the future. “We’ve clearly moved into a world where we’re all NHS patients but have episodes of private care,” he said.
That’s “a million miles away from a US system,” he added. There is no universal health care in America and most people have private health insurance because health care is so expensive.
“There is a huge commitment to the NHS. You can’t underestimate that,” said Ash.
Source: CNN Brasil
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