HM Special Reports

This year is one of anniversaries for Mike Neeb; he celebrates his 25th year with HCA and his tenth as chief executive of HCA International, which owns six leading private hospitals in London including the Portland, Wellington and London Bridge.

Patients get sick seven days a week so why do we still have a five day service in the NHS? The secretary of state for health, Jeremy Hunt, has been advocating for a proper 24/7 service for a while, pointing to worrying statistics that patients admitted and treated in hospitals at the weekends have a higher chance of dying than during the working week, because there are fewer staff on duty. Elsewhere in the service sector, from a consumer point of view, we have long been used to extended opening hours to meet our purchasing, banking, communications, and leisure requirements and to suit our availability, so why not in the NHS too, in order to meet our healthcare needs? Also, it seems such a waste of resource to have expensive diagnostic equipment lying fallow for two days every week when demand exceeds supply.

Suhail Mirza looks at how private hospital providers are searching for growth in self-pay as PMI remains flat

Dr Victor Chua, Partner at Mansfield Advisors, looks at the potential for increased M&A activity and outsourcing in the independent pathology market In our last article, we looked at Monitor’s proposals to drastically cut the tariff for non-emergency orthopaedic procedures. It looks like the proposal has been taken off the table for now. On 6th January 2016, Monitor published a new draft tariff workbook. Instead of rebalancing the tariff by increasing some specialities and decreasing others, it looks like an average 1% increase across all procedures. This is good news for the independent sector.

By Ian Targett, health director, and John Clarke, account director, at Westminster Advisors

Can GP apps cure the ills of the doctor’s waiting room or are they little more than a complementary medicine?

The difference between central London and the rest of the UK in terms of private healthcare has long been a matter of discussion and debate, with one question at its heart – is one more profitable than the other?

The past two years has seen a series of overseas investments in UK private healthcare companies. Last year the US hospital management firm Universal Health Services acquired Cygnet Health Care for approximately £205m and Acadia Healthcare, an American psychiatric provider, acquired Partnerships in Care (PiC) from its private equity owners Cinven for approximately $660m (£393m). In 2015, the Dallas- based Tenet Healthcare Corporation bought private hospital group Aspen Healthcare from Welsh Carson for $215m (£142m) as part of a deal that will see it form the largest provider of ambulatory services in the US. This was followed by the acquisition of Aspen’s property portfolio by US property investor Health Care REIT for £226m. This June, the South African hospital group Mediclinic acquired a 29.9% stake in Spire Healthcare for £432m while July saw GenesisCare, Austrlia’s largest provider of radiotherapy services, buy CancerPartners UK for an undisclosed sum.

The independent mental health sector in the UK has been consolidating at an unprecedented rate since the entry of two US health giants. In a changing market, Maria Davies explored why size matters

Suhail Mirza looks at the Health Secretary’s latest measures to curb agency spending in the NHS and argues that perhaps it is time to stop demonising’ temporary staffing providers