How is British medical treatment when going abroad to see a doctor?

As the most developed medical country in the world, the medical care in the United States has always attracted the attention of international patients; however, for the United Kingdom, the oldest developed country in the world, its medical system, technology, and service level are not satisfactory to Chinese people. Little is known. Below is a list of how medical care in the UK is for people who want to go abroad for medical treatment. Please read it.

How about British medical treatment when going abroad?

1. Free medical care for all

The United Kingdom is a globally recognized leader in the field of medical care. It has created free medical care for all. The service system, the British National Health Service (NHS), is praised by countries around the world for its low health costs and good health performance.

The NHS consists of three levels of services: primary medical services provided by general practitioners, and secondary and tertiary medical services provided by specialists in hospitals. Patients must obtain a recommendation from a general practitioner to go to the hospital. Secondary medical services are provided by government-owned district general hospitals, with outpatient departments and inpatient departments, covering specialist diagnosis and treatment and acute hospitalization. Tertiary medical services are provided by higher-level regional or inter-regional hospitals, including higher-tech services such as cancer treatment and organ transplantation.

Although it will bring great financial pressure to the government, the NHS has indeed benefited British residents. Life expectancy in the UK increased by 6.9 years for men and 5.1 years for women between 1981 and 2008.

The NHS system allows almost all British citizens to enjoy free medical services, and almost all hospitals in the NHS system will set up private care. This private care department established by the hospital is managed and operated by the hospital. It is mainly designed to meet the needs of some domestic patients with better economic conditions or international patients.

Private care charges relatively high fees, but it provides domestic and international patients with better economic conditions with a more comfortable medical environment, more convenient medical procedures, and more humane medical services. wait. The hospital provides these patients with one-to-one accompanying service personnel to make the medical treatment process easy, comfortable and fast to meet the needs of different patients.

2. Public hospital system, short access time for new drugs

In a ranking of the proportion of medical and health investment in national GDP of 145 countries, China ranked 139th with less than 5%. , while in the UK it is close to 10%.

90% of hospitals in the UK are public hospitals, and their revenue mainly comes from government taxes and partly from private capital investment, which has nothing to do with the number of patients treated and patient expenses. Therefore, hospitals and doctors only need to focus on diseases without considering financial income, thus avoiding excessive medical treatment to a certain extent.

Compared with China, medical research in the UK is much more open. The UK believes that medical care is more of a social issue than a subject and should have no boundaries. In addition to funding pathology, diagnosis, surgery, drugs, etc., British medical research also funds physics research and media public education.

The UK’s funding for medical research reaches billions of pounds every year, which is equivalent to tens of billions when converted into RMB. The access time for new drugs is also relatively short, about 3-6 months. However, when new foreign drugs enter China, it often takes 3-5 years or even longer.