NHS Waiting Lists Are Driving Private Health Demand, Says Broadstone

NHS waiting lists are no secret and many people in A&E are being parked in corridors for hours, sometimes a day, before being treated/admitted. So it’s no surprise that anyone who can afford to go private is looking seriously at insurance plans. Your life may depend on it.

Here’s the word;

Insurance-funded private health admissions hit a new high for the first nine months of 2025, a period when NHS waiting lists remained broadly level at 7.4m, according to the latest analysis of PHIN1 and NHS England2 data from Broadstone, a leading independent consultancy.

There were half a million (500,000) admissions funded by Private Medical Insurance (PMI) through Q1-Q3 2025, the highest level ever recorded for this period and up 4,000 on the same period in 2024. Admissions have grown by almost a fifth (16%), compared to before the pandemic when 432,000 PMI-funded admissions were registered in Q1-Q3 2019.

NHS waiting lists fell slightly during the same period but still stood at 7.40 million in Q3 2025, and waiting times for basic diagnostic tests like X-rays and MRIs have risen by 12% in the past year, according to separate NHS England data3. 1.81 million patients were still waiting for diagnostic tests at the end of January 2026 – a quarter (25%) of whom had been in the queue for six weeks or more.

With total private health admissions (including self-pay) reaching 710,000 through the first three quarters of the year, the market looks set to approach one million treatments per year as the market continues to grow in the face of continued strain on the NHS.

Brett Hill, Head of Health & Protection at Broadstone, said: “The growth of PMI-funded treatment shows how integral the private health market is becoming to the nation’s health.

“While we have seen waiting lists decrease slightly over the last couple of years, significant pressures persist, including the ongoing threat of industrial action, and businesses understand that they can no longer rely on the NHS to ensure the good health of their employees.

“As a result, PMI-funded admissions – the majority of which are funded by employer-paid schemes – have risen significantly above pre-pandemic levels. Industry data reinforces this trend with the latest ABI data showing that a record £4 billion was paid out in health claims in 20244, highlighting the scale and cost of this demand.

“It looks likely that we will soon be seeing over 1 million private treatments every year as businesses expand their health insurance coverage and this inevitably feeds through into an increasing volume of claims.”