Alan Milburn is a British Labour Party politician who was Member of Parliament (MP) for Darlington from 1992 to 2010. He served for five years in the Cabinet, first as Chief Secretary to the Treasury from 1998 to 1999, and subsequently as Secretary of State for Health until 2003, when he resigned. He briefly rejoined the Cabinet as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in order to manage Labour's 2005 re-election campaign. He did not seek re-election in the 2010 election.
Andrew David Lansley, Baron Lansley, is a British Conservative politician who previously served as Secretary of State for Health and Leader of the House of Commons. He was Member of Parliament (MP) for South Cambridgeshire from 1997 to 2015.
Emergency medical services in the United Kingdom provide emergency care to people with acute illness or injury and are predominantly provided free at the point of use by the four National Health Services (NHS) of England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. Emergency care including ambulance and emergency department treatment is only free to UK residents and a charge may be made to those not entitled to free NHS care. The NHS commissions most emergency medical services through the 14 NHS organisations with ambulance responsibility across the UK.
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. As a result of each country having different policies and priorities, a variety of differences have developed between these systems since devolution.
Bupa, legally British United Provident Association Limited, is an international health insurance and healthcare group with over 38 million customers worldwide.
Berkshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust provides mental health services and other community based health services, primarily to the resident population of the Royal County of Berkshire, England, in the United Kingdom.
The Health and Social Care Act 2012 is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It provides for the most extensive reorganisation of the structure of the National Health Service in England to date. It removed responsibility for the health of citizens from the Secretary of State for Health, which the post had carried since the inception of the NHS in 1948. It abolished primary care trusts (PCTs) and strategic health authorities (SHAs) and transferred between £60 billion and £80 billion of "commissioning", or healthcare funds, from the abolished PCTs to several hundred clinical commissioning groups, partly run by the general practitioners (GPs) in England but also a major point of access for private service providers. A new executive agency of the Department of Health, Public Health England, was established under the act on 1 April 2013.
Spire Healthcare Group plc is the second largest provider of private healthcare in the United Kingdom. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE 250 Index.
Circle Health Group is a private healthcare provider in the United Kingdom, co-founded in 2004 by former investment banker Ali Parsa and consultant ophthalmologist Massoud Fouladi. The company is currently led by former lastminute.com Finance Director Paolo Pieri. Circle began with independent hospitals near Bath and Reading, and now has hospitals in England, Wales and Scotland, together with two in China.
Clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) were NHS organisations set up by the Health and Social Care Act 2012 to organise the delivery of NHS services in each of their local areas in England. On 1 July 2022 they were abolished and replaced by Integrated care systems as a result of the Health and Care Act 2022.
Heatherwood and Wexham Park Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust ran Heatherwood Hospital in Ascot and Wexham Park Hospital near Slough, Berkshire, England.
Cygnet Health Care is an independent provider of mental health services which operates over 150 centres with more than 2,500 beds across the UK. It is a subsidiary of Universal Health Services, which acquired it for £205 million in 2014. It has 15 rehabilitation sites nationwide, comprising 25 wards and 338 beds. Some of the company's clients pay privately, but most are funded by the NHS buying extra capacity. In 2013/4 Lancashire Care NHS Foundation Trust spent £1.2 million with the company.
Out-of-hours services are the arrangements to provide access to healthcare at times when General Practitioner surgeries are closed; in the United Kingdom this is normally between 6.30pm and 8am, at weekends, at Bank Holidays and sometimes if the practice is closed for educational sessions.
Healthcare in London, which consumes about a fifth of the NHS budget in England, is in many respects distinct from that in the rest of the United Kingdom, or England.
Healthcare in Suffolk was the responsibility of two clinical commissioning groups until July 2022: Ipswich and East Suffolk, and West Suffolk.
Private medicine in the UK, where universal state-funded healthcare is provided by the National Health Service, is a niche market.
Healthcare in Norfolk was the responsibility of five clinical commissioning groups: Great Yarmouth and Waveney CCG, Norwich CCG, North Norfolk CCG, West Norfolk CCG and South Norfolk CCG, they merged in April 2020 becoming the Norfolk and Waveney CCG until they were replaced by an integrated care system in July 2022. Social Care is the responsibility of Norfolk County Council.
GP Federations became popular among English general practitioners after 2010 as a means to exploit the opportunities—or mitigate the threats—posed by the Five Year Forward View proposals in the English NHS which envisaged delivering primary care at a larger scale than the traditional GP list. It is widely believed that ‘Practices cannot survive on their own – they have to look at ways of making themselves stronger.’ 15 sites were selected in December 2015 to test new enhanced primary care models serving populations of 30,000 to 50,000 patients. Some, but by no means all, clinical commissioning groups have given financial support to encourage the formation of federations.
The private provision of NHS services has been controversial since at least 1990. Keep Our NHS Public, NHS Support Federation and other groups have campaigned against the threat of privatisation, largely in England.
Practice Plus Group is a healthcare company based in Reading, which claims to be England's largest independent provider of NHS services. It split off from Care UK in October 2019 and controlled by Bridgepoint Group.
