Your Health Your Choice Campaign

Your Health Your Choice Campaign

Health Compare is launching a ‘Your Health Your Choice’ awareness campaign today to help increase public knowledge of NHS patients’ rights, the variation in hospital waiting times across England and what people can do to improve the information they and their doctor can access to make the best hospital treatment choices, based on what’s most important to them.

Our campaign is being supported by GP and TV doctor Dr Arun Ghosh, who has worked within the NHS and for many of the UK’s major private healthcare providers.

Dr Ghosh says:

"When it comes to choosing where to have your non-emergency hospital treatment, the right to choose from a range of providers across the country, whether at an NHS or private hospital, is a key principle of the NHS Constitution for England for most patients. Knowing what’s possible and exercising your rights could mean securing treatment more quickly."

"We need to imagine the NHS as exactly that – a national health service, rather than a ‘wait and only use the hospital that’s near me’ service. GPs often default to referring patients to local hospitals but looking further afield for those who can and are willing to travel further can open up more possibilities, not just in terms of shorter waiting times but also patient access to specialist clinics, treatments and consultants in other parts of the country."

Attitudes to Hospital Waiting Times and Treatment Research Report

Health Compare is also publishing survey findings today that reveal a public willingness to travel further for faster access to NHS hospital treatment, amid a lack of awareness of the legal right to choose a hospital or change hospital after waiting for more than 18 weeks for NHS treatment to start.

Click here to read the ‘Attitudes to Hospital Waiting Times & Treatment in England: Public Understanding and Experience of NHS Patient Choice in England in 2020 and 2022’ report.

The research, commissioned in early 2020 and again at the end of April 2022 examined public understanding and experience of their NHS right to choose or change choice of hospital.

Over half of the research respondents surveyed this year (53%) were unaware that they had a legal right to choose a hospital for non-emergency NHS treatment; 62% did not know that NHS patients in England can choose from hospitals across the country; and 81% were unaware that patients have the right to ask to change hospital if they have been waiting for more than 18 weeks for treatment to start.

When asked about exercising these rights, 61% said they would travel further than their local hospital if they were offered NHS treatment three months sooner, with 86 miles being the average distance people said they would consider travelling for faster or higher quality rated treatment.

Patient choice not routinely offered

Of all the adults surveyed this year who had been referred for hospital treatment by their GP, only 20% said they were offered a choice of hospital and only 25% said their GP had told them how long they would likely need to wait - a significant decline compared to our February 2020 survey, when 63% said their GP had told them what their wait was likely to be, possibly due to the effects of the pandemic.

Furthermore, 70% of people surveyed in 2022 were not aware that their legal right to choose a hospital includes private hospitals that offer NHS treatment. Only 17% of people said they could recall being offered this choice. Compared to 60% recalling this being offered in 2020, this is a sharp decline in patient choice at a time when the numbers of people waiting for NHS treatment are at an all-time high.

Your Health, Your Choice, Choose Well

Dr Ghosh says:

"The 'Your Health Your Choice' campaign is as much for doctors as it is for patients – as we realise that people can look at options in other areas, it will actually help change our routine way of doing things."

Providing patients with impartial information and an easy-to-use search website to support conversations with their doctor about health service choices is the motivation behind Health Compare, as our Chief Executive, Andrew Burgess, explains:

"This is why we created Health Compare – to help patients compare health services in the same way that you might use MoneySavingExpert or Booking.com to choose a supplier. We’ve used a similar approach to champion patient rights and consumer choice in healthcare- covering hospitals, GP practices and online GPs, care homes and care at home services across the country."

Health Compare is the only platform that helps patients and families in England to compare all available options – paid for by the NHS, by private self-pay or covered by insurance - in one easy-to-use place online, that’s free to use and impartial, with no sponsored search results.

Our platform enables you to search for your nearest hospital with the shortest wait for individual treatments and to compare waiting times, quality ratings and % cancelled operations at over 700 NHS and private hospitals in England, with data covering over 50,000 consultants shown alongside the data for each hospital.

Average hospital waiting times are calculated using the latest published data from NHS England, incorporating all hospitals that submit “Referral To Treatment” (RTT) data.

See https://www.england.nhs.uk/statistics/statistical-work-areas/rtt-waiting-times/