If you get private insurance you pay extra to cover inner London hospitals unless you live there.
I haven’t used the NHS for the 6 years that I’ve lived here tried it once when I was looking for some physiotherapy for my knee got told by the GP that it will take 3 months called AXA which was then my provider and got an approval for 3 sessions which was then extended to 12 the same week.
I don’t even book GP appointments via the normal NHS route any more all of the GPs are technically private anyhow they just accept NHS patients and getting a booking via private health care is just that much more convenient since they see you within 24 hours and evening appointments are much more available.
> If you get private insurance you pay extra to cover inner London hospitals unless you live there.
That's kind of the opposite of what I was saying anyway. It's fair enough if you are making a decision to go to a more expensive hospital for your own reasons.
Yeah, private healthcare in the UK is convenient but far from essential. Physiotherapy was actually exactly what came to mind, I believe it's one of those parts which are always chronically under-resourced.
It’s also the fact that you can’t register with more than one GP so if you don’t live within say 30min of your work going to doctor appointments is a day off essentially not to mention that if you don’t pretend to be dying when you call them they’ll tell you to get some rest and call again in 3 days.
If you go to A&E sure NHS is good enough, but for preventative care and general appointments however it’s pretty poor same goes for any kind of specialist care unless you are getting it at the hospital.
Don’t get me wrong universal healthcare is important single payer universal isn’t, and the NHS’s trust structure is really poor so if you live in an area where the trust is literarily bankrupt the level of care you get is piss poor at best.
I think the biggest mistake the Brits did is to prevent the NHS from providing premium services at a cost like better rooms or cosmetic surgery.
The best healthcare systems in the world are those in which the healthcare providers are non-profit, are required to maintain a specific subset of services defined by the government, aren’t allowed to deny service but are allowed to make money on the side with things that aren’t covered by the government.
That extra money is key because as non-profits the only thing they can do with it is to reinvest it in either their staff or their services there are no shareholders to give dividends too.
This is something the NHS lacks I would much rather pay the NHS the same money I pay to Bupa and get the same service as I can get now knowing that some of that money is going to go into improving the NHS as a whole.
The NHS's trust structure is more about forcing a market into somewhere it has no place than about healthcare outcomes.
When we once elected to go private to queue jump we got to see an NHS consultant privately, in an NHS hospital, and all follow on treatment was on the NHS. So it was a simple case of a few hundred pounds for private scan and consultation.
Most hospitals and maternity units have private rooms as an option. As far as I know they're not restricted or limited in any way, unless it's changed since our experiences. We've not needed a hospital for a while.
If I see an NHS consultant privately they get a little extra personal income. So if I took a private room where does the profit go in the current system? Treasury?
I haven’t used the NHS for the 6 years that I’ve lived here tried it once when I was looking for some physiotherapy for my knee got told by the GP that it will take 3 months called AXA which was then my provider and got an approval for 3 sessions which was then extended to 12 the same week.
I don’t even book GP appointments via the normal NHS route any more all of the GPs are technically private anyhow they just accept NHS patients and getting a booking via private health care is just that much more convenient since they see you within 24 hours and evening appointments are much more available.