Private sector to play bigger role to help cut NHS waiting list

Private hospitals will provide NHS patients in England with up to a million extra appointments, scans and operations a year as part of the government's drive to end the care backlog.

- Denis Campbell

The move represents a significant expansion of the independent sector's role in helping the health service tackle the long waits for treatment that built up under the Conservatives.

Keir Starmer, the prime minister, unveiled the NHS's greater use of private healthcare in a major speech yesterday setting out his elective reform plan to address a waiting list for planned care in which 6.4 million people are waiting for 7.5m treatments.

Private operators will receive an extra £2.5bn a year in government funding, taking the total amount to almost £16bn, if they deliver the big increase in care and treatment that Starmer outlined.

The plan is a key element in a scheme that is intended to mean that patients no longer have to wait more than 18 weeks for non-urgent hospital-based care by spring 2029.

The independent sector already provides about 5m outpatient appointments, diagnostic tests and operations a year to the NHS - about 10% of all its elective activity. The planned further 1m appointments would increase that by about 20%.

The private sector already receives £12.3bn a year for treating NHS patients, according to the Department of Health and Social Care's most recent annual report, published last month.

Its relationship with the NHS has become so entwined that private hospitals now carry out almost one in five NHS-funded operations on people stuck on the waiting list. They already undertake about a quarter of all hip and knee replacements and the same proportion of ophthalmic surgery, such as cataract removals, performed on NHS patients.