Our website is designed to help you make informed decisions about your treatment in a private hospital. This guide explains how we can do that (and what we can't do).*
If you’re new to private healthcare, we recommend you start your journey with our short animations:
- How can PHIN help me with my choice of independent provider and consultant?
- Who carries out my private healthcare treatment?
- Where do I get private healthcare?
What PHIN’s website can do…
1. Allow you to look up hospitals and consultants
You can use the search function (which looks like the picture below) on our homepage to get more information about individual hospitals and consultants.
The hospital profiles allow you to see information such as:
- patient feedback scores
- the hospital's rating from the regulator
- the total number of patients admitted
- the facilities available
Hospitals are required to submit this information to PHIN and if the hospital profile does not contain this information it means PHIN has not yet received it.
Consultants also have their own profiles. These can tell you about:
- the specific procedures they carry out
- how experienced they are at a particular procedure (total admissions)
- and often other information too, such as patient experience and satisfaction, the consultant's potential fees and their contact details.
- fees
Where consultants have supplied contact information, patients can use the contact card in the profiles to email or call them.
Hospital and consultant profiles provide information for the most recent 12 months for which we have data (or less if they have been operating for less than a year). Patient satisfaction scores are for 36 months (to allow enough responses to be collected) and Patient Reported Outcome Measures (PROMS) are for a year, but are a year behind the other measures (to allow for the time it takes to collect PROMs especially after a procedure). This information is updated every three months.
Including the specialty or procedure in your search can help you narrow the results down and identify specific procedure fees, but we understand that not everyone has the medical knowledge to do so, and that not everyone uses the same terms, so this is optional.
We work with the NHS to ensure as much information about the UK healthcare system as possible is available. We publish limited NHS data for hospital sites and consultants’ NHS work in our data sheets.
2. Provide guides to private healthcare
You can use the guides in our Help and advice section to find out more about how the private system works in the UK including:
- using private medical insurance or paying for your treatment directly
- finding out more about the in-patient procedures that are available
- understanding hospital and consultant profiles
- making a complaint
- how PHIN works
3. Help you stay up to date with private healthcare
We post regular updates on our News and Views section about PHIN and wider industry stories. This helps to show our members and the wider public how we are working to help patients.
This is also where we publish our Quarterly Market Updates which share key information about the private healthcare sector, including the number of admissions, how many of those are paid for through insurance and how many are self-paid. It also breaks the information down to devolved nation and regional levels.
Those who are interested in looking at this sort of information in a more detailed way should visit the Our data section of the website, where you can download spreadsheets on:
- Hospital Coverage
- Volume and length of stay
- Patient Feedback
- Hospital Reported Adverse Events
- Infections
- Patient-reported outcome measures (health impact)
- Never events
- Consultant references
- Consultant self-pay fees.
What PHIN’s website can’t do…
1. Make decisions for you
We provide data and guidance to help patients better understand the UK’s private healthcare system, so that you can make better informed decisions. We do not rank hospitals, consultants or insurance providers.
2. Help diagnose your condition
Our website cannot help give you a diagnosis. Symptoms vary widely and it could be misleading if we tried to make it possible to search for them. You should always seek professional medical advice to assess any symptoms – normally through your GP.
3. Inform you about outpatient, mental health, sports medicine, physiotherapy or international services information
Hospitals currently only supply us with data for acute medical and surgical day-case and inpatient private treatment in the UK, so we are unable to provide information on other aspects of healthcare or international services.
4. Health assessments
We do not collect information on health assessments, such as allergy tests, so are unable to provide information on these.
5. Verbatim patient reviews
Although we provide information on patient feedback, we do not publish individual patient comments. Nor can we accept feedback direct from patients. The feedback we publish comes from hospital surveys of patients.
6. Help with complaints about private healthcare
We are unable to help with individual complaints, other than to advise who to contact. See our complaints guide for more information.
7. Book appointments
We do not currently offer the facility to book appointments directly from our website. You can get contact information for the hospitals and consultants you want to book with on their profiles.
8. Showing associated insurance companies
We do not publish information about which hospitals/consultants work with different insurance companies. If you are interested in using a particular hospital or consultant, you should check with your insurance company first. We will start publishing information about the insurers different consultants work with in 2024.
Other places to get help
We can’t help every patient in every case, so we’ve put together a page of links to other organisations who might be better placed to help.
* This page tells you how PHIN can help you but the website also gives you access to detailed datasheets of outcome by hospital and consultant as well as the facility to check measures on an individual site and clinician basis.
