Plus: Private ambulance service charging £99 opens to tackle patient delays
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Morning all,
On Wednesday it was revealed that the NHS waiting list could be as high as 10 million, according to new data from the Office for National Statistics.
The poll from the ONS also revealed one in 20 people who call their GP for help are told to call back on another day and more than one in 10 were told they would need to wait for more than two weeks for care.
With the survey front of mind, I thought I'd share a little anecdote of my experience with a private GP service.
This week, after experiencing all-too-familiar difficulties getting through to my own GP, I attempted to use a private service available through my employer.
It got off to a great start when I was offered a phone appointment the next day. However, in the end, all the private GP could do was to recommend blood test.
To get this – you guessed it – I had to go back to my NHS GP...
In other news, Health Check readers may remember a shocking report we published last month exposing the scale of sexual harassment experienced by trainees within NHS ambulance services.
Since then, The Ambulance Staff Charity has shared exclusive data with me. It shows that out of the 623 workers who sought help in 2023, one in seven were affected by issues related to sexual harassment – and 68 per cent of these staff members were women.
Of the students that came forward, eight per cent raised issues of bullying and harassment and all of them were women
The issues brought to the charity include sexually inappropriate behaviour dismissed as "banter"; sexual assault; domestic and physical violence where a partner worked within the same station and services did not transfer either person to another station; and collective sexually inappropriate behaviours that were condoned or ignored by management.
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This week, The Independent published my story on a new private ambulance service, which is being launched in the East of England.
You may not know, but privately run ambulance services have existed for a long time. However, they are usually used by NHS ambulance services to provide additional emergency support and non-emergency transport: for example, taking patients who require dialysis treatment to hospital.
The difference with this new service, launched by MET medical, is that it can be accessed by patients directly. People will be able to pay £99 for an ambulance to come to them, complete with a qualified paramedic.
This is a new domain for private ambulance services and its introduction reflects the growing issue with access to NHS care.
Horrendous reports of patients waiting hours for ambulances emerged last year. Some were left on cold floors and others were kept outdoors, despite many of them being vulnerable and elderly. This is not to mention that the crisis in ambulance services was recognised in 2023 as the biggest safety risk facing the NHS.
The new service arrives as more people turn towards private health insurance, amid fears over spiralling NHS waiting lists. A close relative of mine was recently told she would have to wait two months following an urgent referral and so went private instead.
Many will have stories just like this. And valid concerns have been raised in response to this effective creation of a two tier system within urgent and emergency care.
The issue here isn't the provider who has jumped in to fill a gap, it is the fact needs cannot be be met by current NHS services.
Could this new service trigger the creation of more private urgent and emergency care within the UK?
Currently, there aren't fully functioning private A&Es and they wouldn't be allowed under current CQC rules. But, could this situation change?
In my view it's becoming more of a possibility.
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According to the National Autistic Society, at least one in 100 children and adults are autistic, which means there are more than 700,000 autistic people in the UK, with more than 200,000 autistic pupils in England.
It is often parents who notice differences in their child's development first.
"Children can be diagnosed as autistic when they're quite young, in some cases from the age of two. But not everyone is diagnosed early in life. It's quite common for a child to not get their diagnosis until they are older, or even as an adult," said Joey Nettleton Burrows, policy and public affairs manager at the National Autistic Society.
So, what is the youngest age that autism can show up in children? Health experts share everything you need to know.
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