Three countries go private to reduce cataract waiting times

Market Scope

Plagued by chronically long waiting times for cataract surgery as well as other procedures, Great Britain , Canada and New South Wales , Australia 's most populous state, are spending millions of dollars to send patients in their public health systems to private providers.

You might call long waits for cataract surgery the British sickness, since it seems to mainly affect Great Britain and its closest former colonies. New Zealand also reports long waits, though its government has not announced plans recently to reduce them.

All four nations have centralized healthcare systems with overextended public facilities, but many other centralized systems – notably those in France , Germany , Austria and Belgium -- do not report problems with long waiting lists.

Great Britain

The delays are particularly aggravating in Great Britain , where I million people are on National Health Service waiting lists for some kind of procedure, including cataract surgery . Waits for cataract surgery generally are at 200 days and as high as one year in some areas.

The NHS is spending $94 million to pare back cataract waiting lists to three months by this summer. Effects of the new policy are not known yet, but already patients are seeing changes.

Once limited to care only within their community, patients are now allowed to opt for faster treatment at other sites within the NHS or at private facilities paid by the NHS. For example, patients in Wales , which has some of the longest waits in the country, now can travel to a mobile eye clinic 400 miles away in Oxfordshire.

NHS regional primary care trusts now can spend up to 15 percent of their budgets in the private sector, and it often goes to caregivers visiting the country. Companies such as Netcare in South Africa , Levent Clinics in Turkey and Apollo Hospital Network in India perform cataract surgeries at makeshift clinics. There are signs that the new policy has been working. Six months after Levent arrived in one health district, waits fell from 12 to three months.

Britons also go overseas for cataract surgery, which at least in some cases is paid by NHS. Working through UK-based middlemen like Medibroker, Treatment Choices and Medplex, patients can have their operations within days in Europe, India , South Africa or the Far East .

Canada

Cataract surgery waits are among the longest of any specialty in Canada , varying from 11 weeks in British Columbia to eight months in Toronto .

On Sept. 16, the Canadian government announced that it will give $3.5 billion ( US ) over six years to provincial governments to reduce waiting times in five priority areas, including cataract surgery.

Some public hospitals are already contracting with private providers to break up the logjam. In Vancouver , for example, the private Northmount Eye Surgery Centre is performing 620 cataract surgeries a year for Lions Gate Hospital and has reduced the hospital's cataract waiting list by 13 percent.

Australia

New South Wales is buying space in private hospitals – at a cost of $25 million ( US ) over 16 months -- to accommodate patients on waiting lists for cataract surgery and other procedures, according to a plan announced Sept. 14.

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