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NHS paid private firms £500m to ‘ease backlog’. Fewer patients got seen

The health service saw 6.6% fewer people in 2022 than 2019, despite lucrative contracts to fix wait lists

By Adam Bychawski
NHS paid private firms £500m to ‘ease backlog’. Fewer patients got seen
The £500m handed to private firms last year could have funded an 8% uplift in wages for junior doctors, who are striking this week over pay | Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images
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The government handed almost half a billion pounds to private healthcare companies to fix the NHS backlog last year, yet is still struggling to treat any more patients than it was, openDemocracy can reveal.

Experts say the figure is just scratching the surface, with NHS bosses in England having been given the green light to spend up to £10bn on private health companies as part of the government’s plan to reduce the record number of patients waiting for care.

The biggest beneficiary of the outsourcing has been the Australian healthcare multinational Ramsay, which received £134m to offer non-emergency care to NHS patients between 2021 and 2022.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0