NHS: Private Sector

(asked on 28th July 2020) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask Her Majesty's Government what recent conversations they have had with private healthcare providers around future provision of NHS treatment.


Answered by
Lord Bethell Portrait
Lord Bethell
This question was answered on 28th September 2020

National Health Service patients are benefitting from an unprecedented partnership with private hospitals as we battle the COVID-19 outbreak. The Department and NHS England and NHS Improvement have worked with the independent sector to secure all appropriate inpatient capacity and other resource across England. The addition of around 6,500 additional beds has increased NHS capacity and ensured that facilities are available for patients diagnosed with COVID-19 whilst ensuring continuity of service for non-COVID-19 patients requiring elective activity, including cancer and other urgent treatment. The latest collected information shows that over 215,000 patient contacts had taken place under the contract.

Independent providers have continued to provide urgent operations for their private pay or insured patients as well as for NHS patients. From the middle of May 2020, independent providers have also been able to provide more routine elective work to private pay or insured patients and where this has been agreed locally with the NHS.

Regarding future provision of NHS treatment, an invitation to tender will be issued by NHS England and NHS Improvement to the healthcare market in October 2020. It will invite providers of elective care services to put themselves forward to be appointed to a framework and, as such, available to deliver elective services to NHS patients, on a cost-per-case basis, at rates reflecting those paid to providers for the same services pre-COVID-19


As part of preparing for winter, the Government has provided an additional £3 billion to the NHS. This includes additional funding to the NHS to allow them to continue to use additional hospital capacity from the independent sector, and to maintain the Nightingale hospitals, in their current state, until the end of March 2021.

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