Healthcare in the United Kingdom
Healthcare in the United Kingdom is a devolved matter, with England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales each having their own systems of publicly funded healthcare, funded by and accountable to separate governments and parliaments, together with smaller private sector and voluntary provision.
[16] Each NHS system uses General Practitioners (GPs) to provide primary healthcare and to make referrals to further services as necessary.
Hospitals then provide more specialist services, including care for patients with psychiatric illnesses, as well as direct access to emergency departments.
Community pharmacies are privately owned but have contracts with the relevant health service to supply prescription drugs.
Several other countries either copy the UK's model or directly rely on Britain's assessments for their own decisions on state-financed drug reimbursements.
It remains a separate body from the other public health systems in the United Kingdom, although this is often not realised by patients when "cross-border" or emergency care is involved due to the level of co-operation and co-ordination; occasionally becoming apparent in cases where patients are repatriated by the Scottish Ambulance Service to a hospital in their country of residence once essential treatment has been given but they are not yet fit to travel by non-ambulance transport.
[31] In England and Wales, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) sets guidelines for medical practitioners as to how various conditions should be treated and whether or not a particular treatment should be funded.
[33] Since January 2007, the NHS have been able to claim back the cost of treatment, and for ambulance services, for those who have been paid personal injury compensation.
[37] From April 2020, those with greatest need—disabled people, frequent outpatient attenders, parents of sick children staying overnight and staff working night shifts—have had access to free parking in England.
In England, a fixed prescription charge is payable for up to a three-month supply of each item (£9.35 as of April 2022[update]), regardless of actual cost.
[43] There are many exemptions from the charge, including patients under 16 years old (18 if still in full-time education), over 60, with certain medical conditions, on low incomes or in receipt of certain benefits.
[44] In recent years, despite some evidence that a large proportion of the public oppose such involvement,[45] the private sector has been used to increase NHS capacity.
[53] In January 2010 the Nuffield Trust published a comparative study of NHS performance in England and the devolved administrations since devolution, concluding that while Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have had higher levels of funding per capita than England, with the latter having fewer doctors, nurses and managers per head of population, the English NHS is making better use of the resources by delivering relatively higher levels of activity, crude productivity of its staff, and lower waiting times.
which concluded that despite the widely publicised policy differences there was little sign that any one country was moving ahead of the others consistently across the available indicators of performance.
It also complained that there was an increasingly limited set of comparable data on the four health systems of the UK which made comparison difficult.
In February 2016 the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development published a review which concluded that performance of the NHS in Wales was little different from that in the rest of the UK.
