Either as a self-referring private patient or if your doctor refers you to a specialist, you can choose where you would like to go for your treatment from a list of NHS hospital trusts that the NHS contracts to provide services for NHS patients OR independent (private) hospitals.
According to the Quality Care Commission, deciding where to be treated involves weighing up a number of different things. The quality of care at a hospital comes first for many people, but there are also practical issues. For example, how easily can you get to the hospital, or if you are going to be an inpatient, is it close enough for family and friends to visit without a long journey? You may also want to know more about your condition and the kind of treatment you need before deciding, in which case your GP can advise you, or you can read more about your condition and what the expert recommends at in Capital Health.
Medical Information to Guide your Choice
You’re making an important decision, so as well as general advice you need specific information that you can rely on. The NHS Choices website shows which hospital trusts offer the service you need, and the quality of their services for different conditions. You can also prepare by using this simple pre-med check list.
The Quality Care Commission run an “annual health check” of the NHS, and publish the results. You can see how well each trust is performing as a whole, and use this as a guide to the quality of treatment and care that patients receive. They also provide more detailed information about the trust’s performance. So if you want to dig deeper, you can find out where it is doing particularly well or where it might have problems. Each trust is rated for each of the last three years. This tells you whether the trust has stayed the same, has improved, or is not performing as well as in previous years. You can also find out how the trust scored when we asked recent patients to tell us about the quality of care they received.
Concerned about a Trust’s performance?
You may be wondering what to do if you’d been thinking of using a particular hospital, but then saw that it didn’t do well in some of the areas. If this is the case, you need to decide whether they are areas that could make a difference to your particular treatment. Again, it is worth seeking the advice of a recognised leading medical authority at in Capital Health.
