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.
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 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.
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 currently receives £12.3bn a year for treating NHS patients, according to last month’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) annual report.
Its relationship with the NHS has become so entwined that private hospitals now carry out almost one in five health service-funded operations on people stuck on the waiting list. They already undertake about a quarter of all hip and knee replacements performed on NHS patients and the same proportion of ophthalmic interventions such as cataract removals.
The extra capacity that the NHS and independent sector partnership agreement is expected to produce will help the health service cut waiting times for people facing particularly long delays for certain types of care, notable gynaecology and orthopaedic treatment.
The deal will “encourage longer-term contractual relationships to be established” between NHS organisations and private sector providers, the DHSC said.
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.
“That is value for money. Keir Starmer claims to set ‘ideology’ aside whilst choosing to invest in expensive long-term private sector contracts. Private ‘spare capacity’ relies on NHS staff and funding to resource their expansion.
“Keir Starmer’s ‘choice’ is to ignore the soaring profits enjoyed by the private sector operating on NHS patients for routine cataract surgery whilst NHS eye departments lose that funding and their staff are unable to treat many patients with other sight-threatening conditions in time.
“The private sector needs NHS funding to be diverted and NHS staff to reduce their NHS hours to staff ‘spare capacity’. Feeding the parasite undermines the health of the NHS host.”
The chief executive of the Independent Healthcare Providers Network, David Hare, said the new agreement was “a clear statement from government, the NHS and independent sector that independent providers are a critical part of the NHS’s long-term recovery and renewal”.
