Four separate healthcare systems are responsible for delivering health services.
Since devolution in the late 1990s, the individual states in England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland have been responsible for organizing and delivering health care services.
United Kingdom residents enjoy access to National Health Services (NHS) based on clinical need rather than the ability to pay. In contrast, free entry to social care services is means-tested, with other eligibility criteria across the nations of the United Kingdom.
There needs to be more doctors, nurses, and healthcare infrastructure.
The United Kingdom has lower levels of doctors and nurses, as well as lower classes of hospital beds and diagnostic equipment, than most high-income countries. These needs have left the country with little spare power and vulnerable to acute shocks such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Also, they have led to increasing waiting checklists for elective maintenance, with over 6 million people in England isolated on a waiting list in 2022.
Healthcare financing delivers high levels of protection against the economic effects of ill health.
Historically, fitness spending in the United Kingdom has undergone sustained growth and austerity cycles. Nevertheless, total health cost has grown in the last decade, getting just over 10% of GDP in 2019. The balance of public funding for health is high and has stayed relatively unchanged over the previous two decades, at around 80% of total health spending. Consequently, UK citizens enjoy high levels of safety against the financial effects of ill health and minimal out-of-pocket costs.
Reforms are targeting more significant integration of care and cross-sectoral collaborations that improve the health and well-being of local populations.
Several barriers persist across the four nations to facilitate meaningful integration between healthcare services, such as unlinked health communication technology systems, duplication of governance arrangements, and a need for more strategic planning. Northern Ireland is the only United Kingdom member nation where the NHS and social care are quite organisationally integrated. However, efforts to facilitate such integration with cross-sectoral partnerships in England, Scotland, and Wales have revved in current years.
In London and different parts of the South East, the NHS has tragically come to that point which tragedy planners had prepared for but hoped would never happen. Namely, a hospital service is so devastated by patients infected by a lethal respiratory condition that it can no longer provide respect to all those in need.
With urgent cancer surgery now being revoked in parts of the capital, this awful moment was addressed by carrying every possible measure to suppress rising infection rates while commandeering all available healthcare resources to limit the loss of life.
It should not be a point when scarce NHS consultants increase their income by doing non-urgent personal work while making a profit for healthcare companies.
Yet this is what is now occurring, according to reports in the Health Service Journal at the weekend.
Unknown to most people, the private hospital sector in the UK does not train or use its doctors.
Its business example can only function if it uses NHS surgeons and anesthetists to carry out the functions – such as hip and knee surgery – which are its primary source of income and profit.
Take away the license granted to NHS consultants to do remote work in their ‘spare’ time, and the industry collapses overnight.
And yet, rather than seek to reciprocate this enormous subsidy during a national crisis, the private hospital sector has instead decided to use NHS consultants to dine non-urgent – but thriving – patients on a personal basis, pulling them away from the pandemic response.
This fact led several NHS medical directors to write a letter trying to ‘shame’ the private hospital sector into committing their resources to treat those urgent cases which are being denied care due to the pandemic and to refusing to support those consultants who are undertaking non-urgent personal work rather than focusing on those most in need.
But there is little point in demanding the better nature of a sector whose prominent partners have sued the NHS, been fined for price fixing and healthcare fraud, and have refused to change patient safety regimes despite numerous high-profile scandals.
Ignore the glossy pamphlet put out by the industry, which aims to demonstrate how the private sector came to the rescue of the NHS during lock 1 of the pandemic when the NHS purchased out the total capacity of the personal hospital sector at an estimated cost of £1 billion – despite accepting very little in return.
Because without this £1 billion bailout, many private hospital units would have faced financial ruin due to lockdown conditions and the inability of their positively lucrative overseas patients to travel to the UK.
In the case of the detailed personal hospital company Spire, for example, its share price tumbled at the peak of the pandemic, and it was near to breaching the covenant with its lenders until the NHS strolled in with a bailout – but since that point, its share price has tripled in value.
Instead of seeking to house and protect the interests of the personal hospital sector and the consultants who work out of them, more robust action is required from the government if it is to eliminate profiteering and create the best use of all the available healthcare help to deal with with the current crisis.
