Much private surgery `unnecessary'
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Your support makes all the difference.PRIVATE HOSPITAL patients are being put through unnecessary operations performed by doctors without the right skills on a weekly basis, according to a hospital consultant.
In a letter to the British Medical Journal, consultant gynaecologist Beverley Webb urges private health insurance companies to crack down on the practice. After a review of standards within the NHS in the wake of the Bristol heart scandal, doctors have been urged to back a similar move in the private sector.
"Equal focus should be applied to private practice where the motivation for inappropriate and excessive treatment is financial," says Mr Webb in a letter to the journal.
There has been concern for some time about some operations in the private sector being carried out by doctors who are not specialist in the area concerned. A general surgeon, for instance, might carry out a skin treatment in the private sector which would have been dealt with by a plastic surgeon in the NHS.
It has been suggested that the Commons health select committee might investigate this issue during the next sessions, but in his letter, Mr Webb writes: "Unnecessary operations are a greater problem, some being performed by doctors who have had only basic training in the techniques."
He says in the aftermath of the Bristol case every medical advisory committee of every private hospital has a responsibility to police the activity of colleagues. "What does one do if a colleague who is not a plastic surgeon performs breast reductions, or a colleague who is not a gynaecologist inappropriately operates on genital prolapse? These examples are observed every week by all of us who have our eyes open.
"Worse, they are obvious to our nursing and paramedical colleagues who wonder why we are doing nothing to correct these anomalies."
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