Hot on the heels of Oxford University Hospitals seeking private partners to expand their private patient income, another prominent Trust is opening of a new diagnostic and treatment centre in central London.
London’s Royal Marsden NHS Foundation Trust, offering a specialist cancer care, has long been a pace-setter in prioritising the expansion of private patient services, prioritising investment in their Chelsea showpiece hospital, while their Sutton site is in dire need of refurbishment.
The Trust’s own press release boasts about the way in which it has now shamelessly picked a location close to the Harley Street hub of private consultations in order to attract more wealthy patients from overseas:
“Located in the heart of the capital’s world-renowned and most respected healthcare district between Oxford Street and Harley Street, the new facility offers world leading standards of cancer care to patients in a calm, modern and reassuring environment.”
The new Cavendish Square centre will “initially” treat both NHS and private patients, but is primarily aiming to offer a Rolls Royce service to the minority with the money to pay, while thousands of NHS patients are facing long delays in accessing cancer care.
With money as the main focus Shams Maladwala, managing director of Royal Marsden Private Care, has admitted to the Financial Times it will be aimed at the “worried well, as well as cancer patients needing treatment.”
RMH Private Care is already the UK’s most lucrative NHS Private Patient Unit. According to LaingBuisson, on average roughly 30% of its patients are from overseas, but this is expected to increase to around 40% at the new Cavendish Square site.
The Financial Times reports that the Trust earned £132.6m from private patients in the year to March 2020, up 9% from £121.3m the previous year and up 44% from £92m in 2016/17: “income from private patients now accounts for 36% of the trust’s patient revenue, and 29% of total revenues.”
The turn to private patients has been driven by a brutal decade of financial austerity that has frozen NHS spending in real terms: Ted Townsend, analyst at healthcare specialist LaingBuisson, told the FT that fees from private patients “offer a more consistent source of income compared to the vagaries that can exist from an under-pressure NHS funding regime”.
The Trust of course assures us that the new centre will “contribute to the financial sustainability of The Royal Marsden”, and that revenue generated from Private Care is “reinvested back into the NHS Foundation Trust”.
But as The Marsden’s private patient income rises towards the 49% limit set by the 2012 Health & Social Care Act, it’s far from clear that the NHS is not the junior partner in the “integrated partnership” with Private Care services.
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