Patients choose private for access to best doctors

The most important thing for patients when choosing which private hospital to go to for treatment is access to the most experienced consultants throughout their stay, a new survey reveals.

A third of people questioned in the survey by leading private hospital provider Spire Healthcare thought that the medical staff who treated them were key to their recovery, while 29 percent of people put fast treatment as their first choice. This was followed by 19 percent of people who thought staying in a clean hospital free from superbugs was more important.

Spire Healthcare’s director of clinical services, Dr Jean-Jacques de Gorter, said: “We weren’t surprised that access to the best consultants came top, as most people want to receive the best treatment available, though I was a little surprised that with all the current attention on MRSA and Clostridium difficile recently that cleanliness didn’t feature more highly.”

Being given more information after their stay in hospital came bottom of the list of reasons people would choose a hospital for, just below staying in comfortable surroundings.

Spire Healthcare was one of the first private hospital providers to publish easily-understandable clinical quality data including MRSA rates, return to theatre rates, surgical site infections and patient satisfaction scores. The data on each of Spire Healthcare’s 25 hospitals is easily accessible on their website – Spirehealthcare.com.

Dr de Gorter added: “People expect to have access to up to date, accurate information when making decision about all aspects of their lives today, so why should healthcare be any different. We have been leading the way in collecting patient-reported outcomes which measure their health gain, for the last ten years and we are passionate about helping people make informed choices about their treatment.”