Healthcare in the UK is weird, isn't it?
It's been judged to a different standard than anything else in society for a very long time and especially after the introduction of the National Health Service in the late 1940s.
'Going private' often had a stigma attached to it or was seen as selling out or a failure to the public, which you should be looking after, and that was interesting because it didn't really apply in any other sphere of society.
Many wealthier people 'went private' in relation to education, either at primary school or secondary school or both.
The introduction of fees to university meant that students were paying university money to teach them, which almost seems like private education to me (although they were subsidised to some degree).
People did this in law forever.
It was possible to get legal aid, but lots of people stepped outside of legal aid to get a 'better' legal experience.
For me, it seemed pretty obvious when I was working in Alfreton running a start-up NHS specialist practice, where we were limited to what we were able to provide due to our contract value.
In those days, we were providing about 100 cases of oral surgery per month for the PCT, but the PCT decided that we would have to spread that out over a year, so our 1200 cases would have to be 100 a month and not stacked up at the start of the year, depending upon demand.
That created a waiting list.
In fact, we were receiving something like 200 to 300 referrals a month, and so the waiting list started to build really quickly.
In this circumstance, we decided the best thing to do was to offer people the opportunity to step outside of the waiting list and pay independently (like NHS, plus).
It wasn't so expensive, but it covered the cost of providing the thing with some profit and understanding that we had to pay pensions and costs etc.
At that time, my then partner Angela was doing an MBA, and one of her MBA projects was into the commerciality of this and what became clear in questioning patients was that the guys who were on the waiting list and were able to buy themselves off it were delighted.
But when it was explained to the other people on the waiting list that people were buying themselves off it and they were moving up the waiting list more quickly, they were delighted, too.
The only people that were not delighted were the general dental practitioners locally, who seemed to see this as some way of gaming the system.
We were renting a facility of the NHS for ludicrous amounts of money and only being allowed to use it twice a week because they wouldn't give us any more contract value.
We were renting it at the price of a full-time rent, so it was totally reasonable for us to fill it with something else, and we had many patients who were desperate to access treatment more quickly, therefore reducing things for the people who couldn't access it more quickly.
It seems to me that our attitudes to private healthcare are changing, and I read now that Rishi Sunak is bringing into the NHS app the ability to book private healthcare to take you off the NHS waiting lists.
That's only ten years and more after we were doing it in Alfreton.
If we don't get creative in our solutions and we continue to do much more of the same thing in the same way for less money, it really is not going to get any better.
And so, our attitudes to accessing private healthcare (and, I suppose, anything else private) are going to have to change and soften, or else we have to head in the other direction and nationalise everything, minimise people's wages and take as much of the national GDP back into societal structures as we can.
I think the latter scenario is quite unlikely regardless of your or my politics.
And so, I reckon we should buckle up and understand that the switch towards private healthcare will go faster and faster, and we all better be ready for what's coming next.
Blog Post Number - 3456
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