‘Betting against the NHS’: £1bn private hospital to open in central London
A new 184-bed private hospital is about to open in London, the second-largest in the capital, where patients will enjoy views of Buckingham Palace and will be treated by doctors understood to be paid up to £350,000 a year.
It provides a stark contrast with the NHS, which is buckling under the strain ofrecord waiting lists, backlogs for cancer care and routine operations and a resurgence of Covid cases that is putting pressure on wards and staffing.
The opening of the Ohio-based Cleveland Clinic’s first London hospital at the end of this month comes at a time when the private health sector is booming. With 29 intensive care unit beds and eight operating theatres staffed by 1,200 people, the eight-storey site – estimated by analysts to have cost £1bn – will add to concerns about the emergence of a two-tier healthcare system.
Among London’s 19 private hospitals, it will be second biggest after the Wellington hospital in St John’s Wood, which is run by the US company HCA.
Specialising in neurology, cardiology, orthopaedics and digestive care, the new hospital boasts a neurosurgical operating theatre twice the usual size, with an MRI scanner in the room beside it – allowing the surgeon to wheel a patient over during an operation to check whether a brain tumour or other abnormalities have been completely removed.
The only other UK facility with this setup is the NHS National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery in Bloomsbury, central London. In other hospitals, more surgery is required when further abnormalities are discovered in the weeks after an operation.
Unlike other British hospitals, Cleveland Clinic London has a pharmacy robot that laser-cuts strips of tablets into single doses and adds a barcode. These are then
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