Private healthcare vs nhs
According to a study by the Commonwealth Fund, the National Health Service (NHS) of Great Britain was recognized as the best in the category of “public free medicine”. It is worth noting that the NHS regularly takes top places in various prestigious international rankings. However, both Britons themselves and visiting residents admit that it is quite difficult to do without the services of private clinics. Let’s compare medical insurance of a private company and the NHS.
National Health Service
Today the National Health Service is a huge machine, which employs more than a million specialists (NHS is one of the ten largest employers in the world) and where most people in Great Britain turn for help. In the case of serious and complex diseases, the NHS help is reliable. For example, the service has a special program for urgent diagnosis, treatment and rehabilitation after a stroke, as well as rapid diagnosis in case of suspected cancer. Emergency medical care within the NHS is provided promptly and to everyone without exception. But like any huge system, the health care service is inflexible and difficult to adapt to changing conditions, and therefore sometimes fails.
One of the major problems of the past few years has been the overburdening of hospitals due to budget cuts and staff shortages. How does this affect patients? Everyone in Britain is assigned to a GP (general practitioner). Accordingly, when there is a problem that requires a consultation with a doctor, everyone must first make an appointment with the GP, who, if necessary, will issue a referral to a particular specialist. This is where the “adventures” of the NHS patient begin. It is possible to make an appointment with a doctor, but one will have to be patient. However, if the GP consultation is not enough, patience will have to be added to the endurance, as the waiting period for a subspecialist can take several months.
The system is overloaded at all levels: in addition to consultations, there is currently a huge waiting list for routine surgeries. These are, of course, not fatal cases, but to appreciate the scale of the problem, just turn to the latest NHS report from August 2017, which states that the waiting list for surgery is already more than four million people. This is the highest number of patients in 10 years. As the deputy executive director of NHS Confederation noted in an interview with the Guardian, the current system is extremely unsustainable.
In cases where you have to wait months or sometimes years for free care, most people turn to private medicine. It is very well developed in Britain and among the most advanced in the world. In private clinics, you do not have to wait for an appointment with a doctor and can go straight to see a highly specialized specialist. Usually the results of examinations are known right away, and many surgeries are scheduled in several days. In private clinics, doctors have much more time for each patient, which gives them the opportunity to delve deeper into the problem and explain the patient’s treatment regimen in more detail.