News Article
Patient choice failing in practice, IHPN warns
The UK’s Independent Healthcare Providers Network (IHPN) is calling for a renewed national focus on patient choice after new research found that GPs overwhelmingly support the principle but face significant barriers to delivering it consistently.
Polling of more than 800 GPs found that almost two-thirds (62%) believe offering patients a choice of provider is important but difficult to achieve in practice, while just 10% said the current system works well. Only 36% of GPs said they routinely discuss or offer patients a choice of provider when making elective referrals, despite patient choice being a long-standing legal right within the NHS.
The report argues that operational challenges, rather than opposition from clinicians, are preventing wider use of patient choice. GPs identified referral management systems, limited consultation time, increasingly complex care pathways and poor access to up-to-date provider information as the biggest obstacles. Nearly seven in 10 respondents also said expectations around patient choice were unclear.
The findings come as the Government continues to position patient choice as a central element of NHS elective recovery and its longer-term reform agenda. IHPN argues that improving access to information on provider capacity and waiting times could help make better use of available healthcare capacity across both NHS and independent sector providers.
The report highlights the contribution of the independent sector, noting that one in five NHS operations are now delivered by independent providers and that 1.6 million NHS patients were treated in the sector during 2024. It also points to shorter average waiting times and strong quality ratings among independent hospitals as evidence that wider use of patient choice could help reduce elective backlogs.
To improve delivery, IHPN recommends clearer national accountability for patient choice, simpler referral pathways, better integration of waiting time and provider data into NHS e-Referral systems, and stronger public awareness of patients’ legal rights. It also calls for patient choice to be embedded in redesigned care pathways and for the NHS App to become a genuine booking platform enabling patients to compare providers and waiting times.
The report concludes that without practical reforms, patient choice risks remaining a policy aspiration rather than a routine part of NHS care, limiting the NHS’s ability to reduce waiting lists and make full use of available capacity across the healthcare system.
