Foreign surgeons to help cut NHS waiting lists

American and European healthcare providers are being urged to send teams of surgeons to England to help cut the huge NHS waiting list for routine operations, the Secretary of State for Health said yesterday.

Alan Milburn said he was inviting two of America's biggest healthcare companies and their European counterparts to "invest" in permanent treatment centres in England or send over surgical teams.

Overseas teams of surgeons, who could start arriving this summer, will be paid enhanced rates by the NHS to provide conveyor-belt operations such as hip and knee replacements, cataract removals and other operations.

Mr Milburn wants to make full use of the private sector to overcome "the biggest constraint on the NHS" – its lack of capacity to treat thousands of patients who have to wait for months for non-urgent surgery.

In a speech to the NHS Confederation in Harrogate, he said that overseas medical teams would be paid to "provide NHS services" in parts of the country with the longest queues. The companies might decide to build their own clinics, in which case they would be guaranteed enough NHS work to make it viable, or they could use theatres at existing hospitals during weekends or when native surgical teams are on holiday.

Mr Milburn said: "We are now in discussions with a number of major overseas providers to bring clinical teams – in particular extra surgeons and other doctors – to this country.

"I will be meeting with prospective providers from both Europe and America over the course of the next few months with a view to encouraging them to invest in Britain. They will concentrate on elective surgery in hard-pressed specialties in those parts of the country where capacity constraints are greatest. I expect to see a growing number of these new providers in place beginning later this year.

"Like NHS use of existing private-sector providers, this is not a temporary measure. These new providers will become a permanent feature of the new NHS landscape."

Next month Mr Milburn is expected to meet representatives from Kaiser Permanente, America's largest not-for-profit healthcare group, and executives from UnitedHealthcare, a commercial concern that is worth £15bn.

A recent study in the British Medical Journal said that Kaiser, which is based in California, provided substantially better health care than the NHS at roughly the same cost. Kaiser patients had access to twice as many specialists, spent one-third of the time in hospital that NHS patients do, and never waited more than five months for an operation, the research showed.

Germedic GmbH, which has 120 private clinics in Germany, and Capio, a leading Swedish firm, are also on the list of contenders, as are companies in Spain, Switzerland and France.

A Department of Health spokesman said there was limited capacity within Britain's own private sector, which was why the Government was looking abroad.

Gill Morgan, chief executive of the NHS Confederation, said the plan to import medical staff was "eminently sensible" because the biggest problem for the NHS was shortage of staff, buildings and equipment.

But Karen Jennings of Unison, the biggest health union, said ministers should be investing in the NHS, not creating a dependency culture on the private sector.

* Surgeons are treating 20 per cent fewer patients than they did seven years ago, figures released yesterday showed. The number of general surgery patients treated fell by nearly 20 per cent between 1995 and 2001 and there was a 22 per cent drop in orthopaedics, according to data from the Health Services Management Centre at Birmingham University.