Private Health: Supporting The NHS?
Although giving a commitment to “protect the NHS”, the Lib-Tory coalition government is still set to make cost savings across the health service. The recently published Health White Paper paves the way for huge job cuts through the abolition of Primary Care Trusts. The Royal College of Nursing has said that almost 27,000 health jobs face the axe, ridiculing the government’s promise to protect the NHS.”
Private hospitals can of course fill this gap and many maintain that this is the real agenda behind the cuts: a creeping privatisation of the health service. I must confess that I am politically wedded to the idea of a health service free of charge at the point of delivery where no one is refused treatment just because they can’t afford it. When asked, most people say that the NHS is one of the defining elements of being British and the institution of which we are most proud. However, what’s clear is that with an aging population living longer and associated advances in medical care, the original concept of the NHS is no longer economically viable. Advances in surgical techniques in fields such as orthopaedic surgery now mean that ailments which were once chronic or sometimes terminal are now entirely treatable, but at a price.
The NHS has also been given a more consumer ethos by successive governments: people are no longer “patients” but “customers”. More choice does not necessarily mean more informed decisions by patients when it comes to medical care. There could be case for letting the NHS focus on the core, really essential medical disciplines like gynaecology where the standards of service should be universal, freely available and driven entirely by medical need. The private hospitals could focus on the less medically critical and more cosmetic procedures, which is probably what they’d prefer to do anyway, concentrating on day surgery cases rather than long term care. Whatever the arrangement, it’s clear that in the future we’ll need a mixture of both to provide continuing health care.
