Travelling for Treatment
Dr Vernon Coleman
The following essay is taken from Vernon Coleman’s book `The Kick-Ass A-Z for Over 60s
For as long as it continues to exist, the NHS will continue to decline. Moreover, private care (currently providing the sort of level of service provided by the NHS two or three decades ago) will also deteriorate. Many consultants who were previously working exclusively in the NHS have carried their bad manners into private practice and many patients don’t know enough to expect better. Even private hospitals have deteriorated, because of the appalling standard set by the NHS. Visit a private hospital and the chances are that you will sit in a crowded waiting room. After a lengthy wait, you will be hurried in to see your consultant who will rush through your consultation so that she (or he) can get onto the next patient. ‘Payment in advance please, please see the receptionist. Cash, cheques and all major credit cards taken.’ Private patients now routinely have to wait days (or weeks) to receive the results of simple blood tests, X-ray tests or tissue sample tests. And they have to wait weeks (or months) for essential, life-saving surgery. Paying privately in Britain now buys you better food, slightly more polite nurses and a television set all of your own that you don't have to feed with tokens. But it doesn’t buy you better medical care (which is, I suspect, what most people suspect they’re going to get when they spend vast amounts of money on private health insurance) though it does, importantly, buy you a good chance of avoiding a deadly antibiotic-resistant infection.
Normal health care practice in other countries is to receive test results within an hour or so and, if you have a serious disorder needing treatment, to receive that treatment within a few days. Not even private patients get that level of care in Britain today.
So, not surprisingly, a growing number of Britons now go abroad for health care; travelling to India or Thailand for medical and surgical treatment. Hospitals in these countries are far cleaner, far more modern and far better equipped than British hospitals. Patients go to hospitals and clinics in Poland, Bulgaria and Japan. And they go not just because they can avoid long waiting lists or because private hospital care is much cheaper than it is in the UK but because they know that they will be treated better and they will be safer. There is far less risk of infection in most other countries. Patients go abroad for major operations and they go for the treatment of relatively minor ailments; many even go abroad for dental treatment.
And the prices (which often include first class hotel accommodation for accompanying relatives) are, even when the costs of travel are included, often considerably lower than the price of treatment in the UK.
For example, a cataract removal in the UK will cost you the best part of £3,000. The same operation would cost around £500 in Bulgaria. A coronary bypass would cost £ 15,000 in the UK and £5,000. A hip replacement would cost £10,000 in the UK and £3,000 in Tunisia. A full set of dentures which would cost £700 in the UK would cost £200 in Latvia.
The private surgery prices in the UK are high because NHS waiting lists are deliberately manipulated, and cruelly long, and private hospitals and doctors take advantage of the demand by pushing their prices sky high.
Patients travel abroad not just because operations and treatments are cheaper outside the UK (and do not involve a long waiting time) but also because they know that the medical and nursing care will be far superior, that they will receive better food and that their relatives will be better received. How embarrassing it is to have to write that. Some hospitals in the Far East have turned non-emergency, elective surgery into a quasi-holiday experience.
The quality of medical care in Britain will continue to deteriorate because the NHS’s answer to all the bad things that happen is not to train people better (or, heaven forbid, to punish the worst offenders) but to add another layer of impenetrable bureaucracy, separating the people with the power from the people making the decisions, and to ensure that no one can ever be held responsible for anything they do.
The people with the power protect the lowly people who take the decisions because that helps to protect the position of the people with the power. It’s an unwritten rule. No one must be punished or even reprimanded because once you start down that slippery slope you end up with some higher level official having to accept responsibility and that cannot be contemplated. And so nothing ever improves. Problems merely create more cover ups. The only concern is to avoid anyone having to say ‘sorry’, or admit that they have made a mistake.
Patients and their relatives may remain unsatisfied, aggrieved or concerned that someone else will suffer in exactly the same way that they did. But none of this seems to matter as long as no jobs are lost or even threatened. Hospital bureaucrats prefer to pay off a litigant (without admitting liability or having to resign) than to defend a case in court.
It is a telling fact that Britain’s NHS now spends more on lawyers than on doctors.
NOTE
The essay above was taken from Vernon Coleman’s book entitled `Kick-Ass A to Z for Over 60s’. For more details please CLICK HERE
Copyright Vernon Coleman 2017
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