Andrew Chadwick-Jones, chief executive officer of Welbeck Health Partners, explains that while the initial growth in the private markets came from self-funded patients, it now comes from insurance.
The growth in Britain’s private healthcare markets has been nothing short of a boom. As Healthcare Today reported in June, this year is on track to be another record year for private healthcare with a 6% rise in invoices to almost three million worth more than £1.3 billion in the first quarter of the year.
Although there was a small dip in the second quarter, in insurer-funded healthcare during the second quarter, the sector finished on a high, and the total volume for the first six months of this year is up 4% year-on-year at 5.9 million, according to healthcare IT developer Healthcode.
In an exclusive interview with Healthcare Today out later this week, Andrew Chadwick-Jones, chief executive officer of Welbeck Health Partners, says that there has been a boom in the market since the Covid-19 pandemic.
Initially, there was a big surge in self-funded procedures.
“People had accumulated ailments during lockdown, NHS waiting lists were very long, and many decided to pay privately to catch up on treatment,” he says, but that was what he calls largely a “one-off phenomenon”.
“Where we’re now seeing the real growth is in the insurance-based market,” he continues. The market here has grown at around 5-10% a year, fuelled by a 30% spike the year after Covid.
A lot of that is employer-driven, he says, but there’s also a growing consumer element made up of small business owners or individuals who decide to buy cover for themselves because they’re worried about NHS access.
The boom is undeniable.
To name just a couple of recent deals, over the past couple of months, international healthcare group Bupa Health Services has acquired its first British hospital since 2008, and private hospital Cleveland Clinic London is to construct an 81,000-square-foot cancer centre at 40 Grosvenor Place in Belgravia, London, to expand its cancer services.
Welbeck Health Partners itself is in the process of opening centres in both Oxford and Cambridge.
While that might have been expected, there has also been an expansion in mental health services.
Earlier this year, Priory, the UK’s largest independent provider of mental health, addiction and adult social care services, said that it would open a mental health and addiction treatment service in South West London called The Residence. And Bupa said that it planned to open 70 mental health centres across the UK in response to increasing demand for workplace mental health support.
As Sarah Melia, general manager of Bupa Health Services, told Healthcare Today in August: “What we’re seeing is a growing focus on employers providing healthcare support for their teams, and it’s becoming quite an essential part of the employee benefits package – even more so than it used to be.”
