LIFTING limits on the amount of private income NHS hospitals are allowed to raise is pushing patients in greater need down waiting lists for operations, an SNP MP has claimed.
Warning that “surgery is not a sport”, the party’s health spokesperson Dr Philippa Whitford, a former consultant surgeon, said changes brought in by the Health and Social Care Act 2012 mean hospitals can offer operations and surgeries to patients to attract extra income.
The act raises the cap from 2% to 49% of private income that an NHS hospital could earn through private patients.
Speaking during a debate on the Queen’s Speech, Whitford said the changes were impacting on NHS patients because surgeons were spending more of their limited time on private patients.
She added: “This idea that it doesn’t impact on NHS patients is nonsense because surgeons have a limited capacity on who they can operate on during the day.
“So if someone is able to jump the queue within the NHS ... they are taking someone else’s place.” Whitford pointed to the example of the My Choice service launched at the Warrington and Halton Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, which has now been “paused”.
It was described as “an affordable self-pay service to enable access for patients denied NHS procedures classified by commissioners to be ‘low clinical priority.”
Whitford said this was an example of NHS hospitals using greater private income to fund services.
She added: “Money is sucked out in all of these different ways. And that is leaving a lack of funding and therefore we’re seeing rationing. And what the rationing is doing is actually pushing people to have to pay for more of their own care.
“We’re hearing that with co-payments, paying for a second cataract, paying for a second hearing aid, but through My Choice, which the Health and Social Care Act also brought in.”
Whitford said there had been cases of hospitals “pinning up price lists” of surgeries and treatments available for patients privately.
She added: “I would just gently suggest as a surgeon, surgery is not a sport. Either the patient needs an operation clinically, in which case it should be provided by the NHS, or they do not need it clinically in which they should not be able to buy it from the NHS “If someone does need that, every single operation is a risk and should never be done to attract in income for an NHS trust.”
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