How to cut months from your NHS waiting time

Tuesday-Wednesday blog

Busy week for multi-cultural enriching murderers?

It seems to have been a busy week for our multi-cultural enriching friends. In Athens an Afghan man was arrested for allegedly killing a British woman, stuffing her body in a suitcase (as one does) and dumping it in an abandoned building. And in Ireland an American heiress, who had reportedly championed enriching immigration, was murdered allegedly by her Jordanian boyfriend.

We can expect more of such enrichment as our rulers scramble to replace us with much more worthy people from Africa’s and the Middle East’s most backward, corrupt, failed-state, worst hell-holes.

How to cut months from your NHS waiting times

(I’ll leave this blog up for a couple of days as it might be useful to some readers, their families, their friends or even, if they are feeling magnanimous, their enemies)

To be treated by an NHS hospital, you first need a referral from your GP. Once you have that referral, there are usually four main stages in getting treatment:

1. An appointment with a specialist – oncologist, cardiologist, neurologist or some other ‘ologist’
2. Having the tests recommended by your ‘ologist’
3. A new appointment with an ‘ologist’ to review the results of the tests and for your ‘ologist’ to book the proposed treatment
4. Getting the treatment

The time between each of these stages can easily be 6 to 8 weeks. For example, when my GP wrote a referral for me to see a cardiologist, she said that I should contact her if I hadn’t heard from my local hospital in 6 or 7 weeks. The NHS eighteen-week waiting target is a constitutional standard stating that 92% of patients should start non-urgent, consultant-led hospital treatment within 18 weeks of a GP referral.

Here’s something many people may not know. If you decide to pay for a consultation with an NHS ‘ologist’s’ private practice, the first consultation will normally cost £250 to £300. Usually it’s £300. However, the second consultation is often much cheaper – £150 to £200. With the cardiologist I booked to see at my local hospital’s heart centre, the first consultation was £300 and the second one £150. If you do book to see an ‘ologist’ paying yourself, waiting times for an appointment are often just a few days instead of the NHS’s 6 to 8 weeks. So you’ve possibly (depending on your condition and your local hospital’s waiting times) already cut 5 to 6 weeks off your treatment time. In my case, by paying privately, I saw a cardiologist 3-4 days after my GP referral rather than the NHS’s 6 to 7 weeks. And, if you’re worried about a possibly serious condition or even unable to work, those 5 to 6 weeks you’ve cut from your waiting time will make a huge change to your life.

Then, of course, you have stage 3 in the process – A new appointment with an ‘ologist’ to review the results of the tests and for your ‘ologist’ to book the proposed treatment. Once you know the date(s) of stage 2 – Having the tests recommended by your ‘ologist’ – you can already book a second appointment with your ‘ologist’ perhaps targetting 2 or 3 days after your tests to give the ‘ologist’ time to review the results. Hey presto, magic. You may have just (depending on your condition and your local hospital’s waiting times) cut another 5 to 6 weeks off your treatment time and it will only have cost you about £450 for the two ‘ologist’ appointments.

You can, of course, go further. If your tests are fairly simple like just one x-ray, you could also pay for that yourself and cut even more time off your treatment time. But if your tests involve scans or cutting off bits of you for biopsy or having unpleasant things shoved down your throat or up your derriere, you should probably get that done on ‘our’ NHS.

The most expensive part of your treatment will usually be stage 4 – getting the hospital treatment. You’ve paid plenty tax during your life and so should probably get the treatment on ‘our’ NHS. In my case, the treatment would have cost around £10,000 if done privately, so I had it on ‘our’ NHS.

Of course, the amount of time you could cut off your treatment time will depend on your condition and your local hospital’s waiting times. But hopefully you can see that by paying privately for the two main consultations with your ‘ologist’, you often can cut weeks or even months off the time from referral to treatment.