For an annual fee of £60 the Health Care Navigator, a private health information service, will seek the most keenly priced hospital most appropriate for your needs. It boasts it is a new “concept” in self-funded healthcare.
The company has a 24-hour Shared Care Nurse helpline that deals with all your health concerns. It can help find “a clear path through the maze of options – both National Health Service (NHS) and private – so that you can get treatment at a time and price that suits you”.
The site can help you make private care arrangements, giving you more control of your health so you never have to wait for treatment. The Navigator also produces the NHS Patient Waiting Times Monitor, a quarterly analysis of the official government-issued statistics.
This analysis interprets the information to provide what we really want to know – the likely average time in our region that we will have to wait to see a consultant or have an operation on the NHS. And how long the wait will be in a particular speciality like ophthalmology if a cataract operation is required.
Another site affiliated to the Navigator is the e-concordat evaluation site. This aims to “increase the capacity of the UK healthcare system to deal more effectively with waiting lists”. It asks providers of acute care services to register their capacity if they can perform additional procedures on a fixed-price package basis and purchasers are asked to post procedures which are being offered on a concordat basis. If you don’t understand what the concordat is, you can click on the phrase “white paper”, where it can be downloaded.