What you need to know
UK expenditure on private acute healthcare rose by 17% between 2014 and 2018, from £7.24 billion to £8.47 billion. Annual growth has slowed to around 2.5% since the 8.1% growth recorded in 2015.
Growth in corporate and personal premiums was relatively even until 2013, with personal PMI premiums rising by 17% and corporate premiums increasing by 19% between 2008 and 2013.
However, corporate premiums rose by 12% between 2014 and 2018, compared with a 1% decline in personal premiums. This reflects lower demand for personal PMI premiums, which have become less attractive due to their steep pricing level. Meanwhile, corporate customers are perceived as more resilient to higher premiums as they can better absorb costs.
Covered in this Report
This report covers the private healthcare sector, and includes the provision of healthcare services through private hospitals and clinics, and the private medical insurance sector, which is so important to the financing of private medical care.
Private residential care and nursing care for the elderly is covered in a separate report published annually by MBD. Other related reports published by MBD include the UK Occupational Healthcare market.
The private healthcare sector operates alongside the publicly available NHS. There is significant inter-relationship between the two systems, with the private sector relying on NHS consultants for a large segment of its medical manpower. The development of the private sector is largely reliant on NHS consultants being available to undertake private work.
The DoH also encourages the NHS to utilise private healthcare facilities where this offers an economic opportunity. For this reason, the sector incorporates a number of different scenarios in addition to publicly financed and public supply health services:
Publicly financed/private supply
Privately financed/public supply
Privately financed/private supply
All values quoted in this report are at current prices unless otherwise specified.
The term billion is used to represent one thousand million.
Some totals in tables do not add exactly due to rounding methods.
