Figures published today by leading healthcare market intelligence provider, LaingBuisson, reveal that UK healthcare spending of £185bn in 2015 continues to be dominated by government expenditure at 80% of all healthcare spend, higher than any other OECD, EU or G7 nation. However, the independent sector is increasingly a key partner in delivering health and social care from both government funded services and non-government sources such as insurance and self-pay.

The 29th edition of LaingBuisson’s UK Healthcare Market Review reveals a market landscape where spending continues to grow, offset by growing demand pressures driven by demographics, expectations and technology. Direct government spending continues to dominate the source of funding – 56% of care home residents are reliant either partially or fully on the state for payment of their fees and over 90% of acute hospital spend is state funded.

The latest research presents figures showing that while there are persistent calls for efficiencies in health expenditure from both national and local government leading to more cost-efficient delivery of services with better outcomes, there is a need to balance the politically unpalatable perception of “privatisation” with the increasing need to deliver more for less and use the best provider and solution to achieve that. As a result, there is an inevitable need to partner more publicly funded services with the independent sector in UK health and social care, and there are increasing examples of this across the broader market in care homes, adult specialist care, mental health hospitals and increasingly acute hospitals, where there is greater use of the independent sector for NHS elective surgery under the ‘e-referral’ system.

UK Independent Healthcare Market Value by Segment, 2015/16

 

Innovations for the 29th Edition of LaingBuisson’s UK Healthcare Market Review

The 29th edition also introduces a number of new features and innovations. These include UK healthcare spending benchmarked against international comparators from the EU, G7 and OECD. As chosen provider of data on the UK independent healthcare sector to the Office for National Statistics, LaingBuisson contributes market data that is in turn submitted to the OECD, WHO and Eurostat. One of the areas we focus on is the potential underreporting of spending in the UK from non-government sources.

Alongside the 29th edition of LaingBuisson’s UK Healthcare Market Review, LaingBuisson are launching CareDirectory. This is a fully searchable, cloud-based curated directory of independent healthcare and social care providers across all segments of the market and is accessible through the iLaingBuisson data solutions portal. This replaces the paper directory which was previously an annex to LaingBuisson’s Healthcare Market Review.

Henry Elphick, CEO of LaingBuisson said:

“The benchmarking exercise demonstrates that the UK faces the same challenges as other developed nations owing to an inexorable increase in costs and expectation set against a finite budget. Government spending alone amounts to £147.1bn and half of that goes to hospitals. This is one of the distinguishing features of the UK, which now has healthcare spending more in line with international levels, and higher than the OECD average.

“We are also pleased to have launched our online CareDirectory. This offers the same information as the paper directory that we used to offer with the UK Healthcare Market Review but it is now online and in a fully searchable database which is updated in real time.”