Private sector’s role in cutting NHS waiting lists in England to rise by 20%

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

Keir Starmer unveiled the NHS’s growing use of private healthcare in a major speech on Monday in which he set out his new elective reform plan to address a waiting list for planned care on 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 to almost £16bn, if they deliver the uplift in care and treatment the prime minister outlined. The initiative is a key element in a plan intended to ensure that patients no longer have to wait more than 18 weeks for non-urgent hospital care by spring 2029.

Starmer said in his speech that he would not let critics of NHS privatisation stop him relying more heavily on the independent sector, because people’s health needs must come first.

“When the waiting lists have ballooned to 7.5m, we will not let ideology or old ways of doing things stand in the way of getting people’s lives back on track.

“It would be a dereliction of duty not to use every available resource to get patients the care they so desperately need,” he said.

But the co-chair of Keep Our NHS Public, Dr Tony O’Sullivan, said the private sector was a parasite that was damaging the health service and that it would lose out as a result of the deal because its own staff would provide most of the expansion of private care.

“Just as in the 2000s, the NHS could provide those million appointments and build sustainable capacity if funding was invested to reopen theatres, provide equipment, support more NHS GPs, community and hospital staff,” he said.

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Source: The Guardian, 6 January 2025