Patients will soon have to fill out a customer satisfaction survey after having an operation. It’s in an attempt to improve the standards of NHS treatment and will begin in April this year. Up to 250,000 patients will be getting the questionnaires, known as ‘patient reported outcome measures’ or PROMs, asking them for their opinions on the success of their procedure and the recovery period afterwards. They will then be used to publish a score online for each hospital or clinic, and it is hoped that this will stir up some competition to achieve as high as possible. Local health authorities can also use this information to commission the best services as judged by patients themselves. This can only be good news for private health insurance customers, as cash plan policy holders have the choice to receive their treatment on the NHS if they wish meaning that they will have access to better quality services and can use their money to fund any losses or costs they might incur as a result.


Private hospitals who carry out work for the NHS will also be subject to PROMs, meaning that these too could improve the quality of their facilities and treatments to compete with other clinics in the new ratings system. Again, this benefits those with private health insurance as they could be visiting these centres as either an NHS patient or to receive private medical treatment. The scores are also designed to allow people to choose which clinic they would like to have their operation at, therefore giving even more option to private health insurance customers who already have a wide range of choice as to where they would like to be treated. PROMs will initially be used to assess patients recovering from the four most common procedures – hip and knee replacements, varicose vein removal and hernia repair operations – but it is hoped that they will be expanded to cover more varied and longer term conditions if they are successful.

Staff sickness is well-renowned as being a huge problem for employers, costing them millions of pounds each year from a loss in productivity. But it seems that a new way to get around this problem is emerging much to the concern of many health professionals. It is now apparent that businesses are putting increasing pressure on workers to carry on with their jobs whilst at home, but this could actually cause more financial loss from sick days in the long term as employees fail to recover fully from their illness. Companies may be advised to invest in private health insurance for their staff as an alternative to piling on unneeded stress for their unwell staff, ensuring that they can return to work as soon as possible.


This pattern of behaviour has been identified in research published in “The Healthy Working Report” towards the end of last year. The study found that over a third of HR professionals (35%) say that their workers are encouraged to carry out basic tasks such as reading emails whilst off sick. Three quarters also said that staff are so worried about the security of their job that they are less inclined to take a day off ill than they were this time last year. A corporate private health insurance policy like those offered by Freedom Healthnet, give employees a much better chance of recovering in a short space of time. By giving a cash lump sum to patients, they will have the choice as to where and when they receive their treatment ensuring that it is as convenient as possible. The top quality health care available in private clinics will return staff to a full level of fitness, making sure that the illness is not likely to return in the immediate future and cause even more money lost to sickness for businesses.