Paying for private consultation has cost Jenny Whitehead her place on the National Health Service (NHS) surgical waiting list. A NHS spokesman said that “Anyone who chooses to pay for a private outpatient consultation cannot receive NHS treatment unless they are then referred on to an NHS pathway by their consultant.”
In 2008, the NHS tried to deny all care to cancer patients who paid for drugs not offered by the health service. The government said that it had ordered the NHS to stop withdrawing care from people who paid privately for unobtainable drugs or treatments.
Continue reading Worrisome Lessons from Britain →
A new report from the Rarer Cancers Forum suggests that 16,000 people in the United Kingdom have been denied cancer drugs by Great Britain’s government-controlled National Health Service (NHS). Key findings:
- Although progress has been made in gaining access to treatment, with 8,750 more patients being given vital treatment, 16,000 have still been denied access to treatments that they may need.
- The National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) needs to improve drug assessment time periods — with the Institute taking 21 months to appraise new cancer drugs, rather than the 6 months promised by ministers.
Additional findings:
- 36 percent of patients cannot find their Primary Care Trusts (PCT’s) cancer procedures and policies on PCT Websites.
- 49 percent of patients were unclear about how quickly they would hear a decision on a request for treatment.
The National Health Service (NHS) considers the traditional, pint-sized beer mugs favored by English pubs, a health hazard. The NHS identified about 87,000 violent incidents each year, where drunken patrons smash a glass mug against another patron’s head or break a beer glass to use the jagged edges as a weapon in a pub brawl. The NHS’s cost to treat bar-related beer glass injuries: $4.3 billion per year. The NHS’s solution: safety glass beer mugs made with glass similar to how auto safety glass is made for windshields.
The official National Health Service (NHS) estimate of British patient deaths or serious injuries due to medical error is 11,000 cases a year. Yet, according to the Sun on July 3, 2009, the Commons Health Select Committee found that thousands of NHS mistakes are covered up and that a better estimate is that 72,000 patients die each year.
Some health reformers in the United States argue that more government controls on how physicians and hospitals practice medicine will improve quality and reduce patient deaths. Avoidable deaths in the US are now said to range from 98,000 to 195,000 every year. The lower number comes from a discredited Institute of Medicine estimate. The higher number comes from HealthGrades, a hardly disinterested party in the business of selling health care quality measures. Given the size of the US population, if government practice guidelines and pay for performance metrics are as successful under ObamaCare as they have been in Britain, expect the number of US deaths from medical errors to almost double to 360,000 a year.
Not if you're British. Not if you get your health care from the British National Health Service. NICE is the British health board that Tom Daschle urges the Obama administration to copy in reforming the American health care system. It rules on everything from who should get a PAP smear to what drugs should available for breast cancer patients. It keeps health costs down.
On October 1, 2008, Medicare announced its first list of “never events.” A never event is something that Medicare believes should never happen and it refuses to pay hospitals when such events occur.
Some of the items on the original October 2008 never event list make sense – surgery on the wrong patient or the wrong body part is obviously inexcusable. So is leaving a surgical instrument in a patient.
Unfortunately the list has expanded to include relatively unlikely but routine complications with the result that Medicare’s “never events” policy has the potential to skew clinical decision making in a way that does grave harm to patients. Continue reading “Never Events” are Pay-for-Performance in Disguise →
According to the British newspaper, Guardian, the administrators at Mid Strafford NHS foundation were so obsessed with meeting the four-hour maximum waiting time admission target that patients were often quickly shuttled to unstaffed units used as ER patient "dumping grounds" without having their conditions adequately screened.
Until recently, hospitals in the British National Health Service told patients that if they paid privately for effective cancer drugs their NHS care would be withdrawn. Yet those same institutions have been quietly selling donated organs to foreigners. Patients from Greece, Cyprus, Libya, the UAR, Israel, and China have received transplants at NHS hospitals. Jumping the queue for a liver transplant costs about £75,000. [link]
The proceeds are split between the transplant surgeon and the hospital trust. The hospitals doing the transplants say that European law requires that non-UK EU patients have as much right to UK livers as British citizens. [link] Other reports say that while European law gives patients the right to seek treatment in other member states, it is up to individual NHS hospital trusts to decide whether they will offer a transplant.
Directives to trim waiting lists using pay-for-performance targets have created a host of unintended consequences for the British National Health Service (NHS).
Targets create incentives to manipulate patient records and official statistics, corrupting data used to measure system performance. Spot checks of NHS hospitals show that they extensively manipulated the data that were supposed to be used to compile waiting lists. Techniques included deliberately booking operations on days patients were known to be on vacation (thus creating an excuse to suspend them from waiting lists in their absence [link], excluding patients from lists if they had waited "too long" and arbitrarily reclassifying patients so that they were shifted to lists that were not monitored [link]. Continue reading Pay for Performance →
A National Health Service (NHS) survey of 500 senior hospital doctors found that 41 percent had private insurance in 2006. The fraction rose to 55 percent in 2007 [link].
According to the British Medical Association spokesman, private medical coverage does not demonstrate a lack of commitment to the NHS. Instead, British doctors want speedy treatment so they can get back to their NHS patients as soon as possible. Continue reading Breast Cancer →
Health Care Policy and Reform Insights | NCPA