Aviva’s private healthcare cover sales rise 25% as NHS struggles with arrears

Featured Sponsor

Store	Link	Sample Product
UK Artful Impressions	Premiere Etsy Store

British insurer Aviva reported an increase in sales of its private medical cover on Wednesday as new data also showed patients turning to private healthcare in record numbers while the Struggles of the NHS with waiting times.

In a trading update, the FTSE 100 insurer said its private healthcare sales rose 25% to £33m in the first quarter of the year as the NHS backlog encouraged more people to go private.

“Although the NHS does a great job for millions of people, there are people who would like to speed up their treatment, or give themselves that confidence that if something were to happen to them, they would like to have that speeded up treatment,” says Aviva. managing director Amanda Blanc he told the Financial Times. “Volumes are very robust and to be honest, we don’t expect that to change anytime soon.”

Aviva took on about 123,000 new private medical clients in the past year, it said. Her products include a virtual physician service that has been appealing to people struggling to secure an appointment with their local practice, she added.

“I think private healthcare should be seen as a positive complement to the NHS in clearly challenging times,” said Blanc. Aviva’s health and protection business generated £2.5 billion in revenue last year.

The number of people waiting to start hospital treatment has reached record high earlier this monthwith data published by NHS England showing 7.3 million patients had yet to start treatment at the end of March.

Research published on Wednesday by the independent Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) also revealed that there were 820,000 private inpatient and day-case admissions in the UK in 2022, the highest number since the organization which tracks treatment data began collecting these records in 2016.

The annual total was up 8 percent year-over-year and represented a 5 percent increase over 2019, the last full year before the Pandemic of covid-19.

More than 200,000 people went private in the fourth quarter of 2022, which also marked a record for any single quarter.

The PHIN reported that procedures paid for by private medical insurance have reached their highest level since the start of the pandemic. There were more paid hospitalizations — where people choose to fund their own health care rather than use private health insurance — in 2022 than in recent years.

PHIN chief executive Ian Gargan expects there will be more than 1 million private sector patients this year and expects private medical insurance to become more popular. “In a cost-of-living crisis, people are still willing to pay and prioritize their health,” he said.

Gargan believes the main causes behind the increase in demand are public awareness of NHS waiting lists and uncertainty about how long they will have to wait. “People know they may be waiting a long time for a cataract or knee replacement,” she added. “They feel that if they haven’t heard from someone in a long time, they’ve been forgotten.”

Spire Healthcare, a London listed company independent health groupin March it reported an 8% increase in revenue in its preliminary results for the year ended December 31, 2022. It said the increase was driven by an increase in private treatment, with private revenues rising 14, 5%.

Its chief executive Justin Ash said at the time that “the past year has seen continued change in healthcare in the UK, with even more people seeking fast and safe private care”. Spire’s perspective added that private patient requests were ahead of the previous year.

International health firm Bupa also reported that demand for private health insurance increased in its full-year results released in March.

Meanwhile, investors weren’t wowed by Aviva’s broader first-quarter performance, with turbulent markets weighing on its assets and its solvency ratio slightly lower than analysts’ expectations.

It also emerged Wednesday that Cevian Capital, the activist investor, had sold the entire stake in Aviva, three years after the launch of his campaign.

Shares of the insurer fell 5% in afternoon trading.