The head of Spire Healthcare, the UK’s biggest hospital company, has said Labour’s plan to turn around long NHS waiting times by using more private hospital capacity is unlikely to work.
Justin Ash, chief executive of Spire Healthcare, said private hospitals could not be expected to solve the crisis in waiting lists overnight.
Shadow health secretary Wes Streeting has said the health service should rely on private hospitals in the “short term” to cut the wait for surgery on the NHS and said he is not constrained by ideology over use of the private sector.
Streeting said his aim was to strengthen the NHS over time, subsequently reducing use of the private sector when it was able to do so.
Ash, 59, said: “Nine of our hospitals are more than 80 per cent full. A lot of them are very busy. Solving a national problem like the pressure on the NHS requires a plan and it requires time. You can’t just flick a switch … You are talking years.”
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With a general election on July 4, the 7.5 million-strong NHS waiting list is going to be a key election battleground.
But Ash said while Spire would “lean into” efforts to help the NHS, his business model was focused on providing care for private patients and not relying on short-term NHS work.
Spire treated a million patients last year at its 39 hospitals with profits rising 32 per cent to £126 million.
Ash said he was not lobbying for more NHS work “because we’re very busy”, and whichever party won the election a long-term plan would be needed. “You can’t suddenly gear up overnight.”
Ash, who lives in Somerset, took over at Spire in 2017 and said his aim was that the NHS accounted for only 30 per cent of the business. But he added that in some parts of the country, the NHS was not abiding by rules that allow patients to choose a private hospital, and this meant that some patients were waiting longer than necessary.
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“There are some systems that restrict choice. Are there patients who should be seeing a consultant who are not getting full access to choice? Yes, we believe that’s true.”
The government has announced plans to force the NHS to offer more choice to patients, including local private providers. In the past year, the private healthcare market has grown 6 per cent, with both insurance and patients paying with their own money on the rise.
Spire has set aside £50 million to cover the compensation and costs of rogue breast surgeon Ian Paterson, who carried out unnecessary surgery on many of his patients at Spire’s Little Aston Hospital in Sutton Coldfield. Paterson was jailed for 20 years in 2017. Inquests into the deaths of 54 of his patients are due to be heard later this year amid suspicions the surgeon may have contributed to the deaths of some.
Ash said Spire was still reviewing the care of patients who had died after treatment by Paterson and he is committed to compensating any patient or their family who had been harmed. He said: “If we find anybody who needs compensating, whatever the impact on the fund, we will compensate them. No question.”
An inquiry into the scandal in 2020 heavily criticised both the NHS and Spire for failing to act on concerns about Paterson and it made a series of recommendations, including a national database of consultants and changes to make sure patients are always fully insured. However, the Department of Health and Social Care’s working group on the inquiry recommendations has not met since January 2023.
