To want to hear your views and experiences of private healthcare

[PaddleBoardingMomma]

Posting for traffic.

Having read a couple of posts this week where the OP was seriously unwell and had an awful time in A & E, also reading past threads of massive referral waiting times, GP's being unhelpful and the struggle to even get seen, it's made me wonder about those of us who have opted for private care and how your experiences have differed?

I must admit, seeing so many struggle and have pretty dire outcomes last year I took out vitality healthcare for me and my two daughters but thankfully haven't needed it yet, so can't comment on what the process is like.

So in summary, for anything routine, you will have a nicer stay, if anything goes wrong you may be shipped back to the NHS and you may have to pay for that NHS treatment.

Can you explain how and why one may have to pay for NHS treatment, @sashh, because this seems unusual.

I had private maternity care. Not a single thing to complain about. Amazing experience from booking in appointment through to post natal checks (including one EMCS and one ELCS).

Ah yes, instead of holding the gov responsible and demanding improvement to our health service, let's fix it by going private instead.

It pisses me off similarly to food banks. I hate that we invent charities to feed the poor when our gov should be ending the poverty. And don't tell me it can't be cured, it absolutely can. It is necessary to create poverty for capitalism to thrive.

I know, the tories ran the country and it's services into the ground, let's all pay to fix it so they don't have to! We don't have a viable opposition!

What a mess.

@BattenbergdowntheHatches

How do you think the NHS should fund 'throwing the kitchen sink' treatment for every person in the country?

Its ludicrous to suggest no one us ever treated promptly or with respect in the nhs.

(Especially if your oh works there!)

I have it via work for our whole family, it was actually something I requested as part of my package.
A few months ago we saw a Private Gynae for DD after 2 years of being Fobbed off by our GP. She wrote to our GP and DD got the medication we had been asking for in dsys
Also when DH was SE and office based it was cheaper for him to pay to see a Private GP at a convenient time than miss work for an ordinary GP appt

@BattenbergdowntheHatches

I'm sure your oh treats people promptly and with respect? Despite his frustration?

Not all NHS provision is crappy. And the kitchen sink is not appropriate in every case. People can have incurable cancer. We cant save every life. Real life is not Greys anatomy.

Of course, if well off people have the means to pay for extra time thats for them to decide. But I'm not sure its a reasonable expectation of a publicly funded health service.

I'm not sure what the difference is between a social insurance system and the nhs and being able to pay privately?

Doesn't it amount to the same?

There are some important differences. If I have time later I'll dig out a graphic I came across once explaining the four main ways for governments to fund healthcare.

I don't want to 'hold the government to account on the NHS'. I'd like us to learn from other developed countries with better outcomes but that will never happen because the NHS is our secular national religion and it's too politically toxic for any party to attempt to change.

I honestly don't know much about the French system, I'm sure it has its flaws. It certainly wasn't top of any best performance tables the last time I looked. But that was a while ago.

you think it’s a reasonable expectation of a Public Health Service that a person with multiple cancer symptoms should be investigated?

yes, absolutely. But thats a different question to the one I asked. Even private practice makes mistakes. A thread like this is bound to be terribly one sided.

But hey. I worship at the cult of a properly funded and staffed and not abused NHS. So my bias is as bad as yours

Oh and of course, the tragic fuck up that is covid has only made cancer diagnosis a million times worse

Something private practice won't have to account for either

We have private cover for the whole family. Means we get GP appointments within hours when we need, quick referrals and the waiting room to see my Gp is lovely and usually I am the only patient waiting to be seen and book for a 30 mins consultation. Don’t need this long, but nice not to be rushed. NHS is on its knees and I am so happy to be able to afford private cover. I am from a country where you pay for healthcare anyway so completely normal to me.

I worked I both, my fiancée has used both, good points about private are low waiting times, nicer surroundings and generally they will give you what you want (even if you don’t always need it) because you’re paying.

Negatives are, if it goes tits up a lot of the staff are not used to dealing with emergencies (so quality of care isn’t as good) and you will get sent via ambulance to an NHS hospital, they give you what you want on very tenuous grounds (I.e. if they can find a way to cover themselves and justify a procedure or test they will do it), this can work well in some cases, where as in others it just subjects patients to unnecessary risks and procedures. The main issue I have with it is patients think they’re getting better treatment when most of the time they’re really not, as an example a procedure we do in the NHS has an overnight stay and a follow up in 6 weeks and another one in three months same procedure done privately by same doctor the patient is discharged the same day and not followed up for three months (because it saves them money).

Just wanted to add I'm not biased against the NHS. It has good bits and bad bits, as any giant public service would do. We saw in the pandemic that it has strengths in quickly testing and rolling out new Covid treatments, for example, because of its huge coverage.

Personally though I'd like to see the system moving away from GPs gatekeeping everything and acknowledgement that as so many Britons are paying out of pocket anyway, we might as well be paying into social insurance. It must be miserable being a GP.

This is the graphic I meant. It's from this site:
site world101.cfr.org/global-era-issues/global-health/how-health-care-works-around-world
We have the top left type of system and the Americans have the bottom left. The other option, hardly ever seriously discussed in the UK, is the top right one. A lot of European countries have that.

@Phineyj

How are so many Britons paying out of pocket?

I will try to find the article that reported on that the other day but I think it may have been the FT, which has a paywall. The main point was that so many Britons are now paying for private treatments (paid for directly or by insurance), crowdfunding, charities, self-treatment etc that our private spending on health is now nearly as high proportionally as in the US. The most serious issue was that this is being seen in all strata of society (e.g. poorer people who can't get treatment on the NHS crowdfunding from friends and relations to access treatment, sometimes in other countries).

FT article here's the link - I think it may be possible to read it without subscription.

@Phineyj

Ah, ok.

I thought you meant in NI.

Did the article say if the crowd funded treatment would have been covered by insurance?

This is the chart I was referring to.