We spoke to Georgina Bishop, Head of Self-pay at The London Clinic, who shared her insights and knowledge of the changing market and how the industry can adapt to make self-pay more accessible. Georgina is passionate about delivering a seamless journey for patients from start to finish, and for the professional healthcare community.
42% of UK adults now see self-pay as a viable healthcare option, and 30% are more likely to consider self-pay since the start of COVID-19, according to the joint Rare. and London Clinic report on self-pay healthcare. The shift cuts across age groups but is particularly pronounced among 18 to 24 year olds, who have grown up with on-demand access to goods and services and bring those expectations to their healthcare decisions. To understand what the data means for private providers in practice, Rare. spoke with Georgina Bishop, Head of Self-pay at The London Clinic.
How is self-pay relieving NHS pressure?
Georgina describes the post-pandemic moment as a release of significant pent-up demand. Patients held off on health investigations and treatments through 18 months of pandemic restriction, in many cases out of consideration for NHS pressure. Now those investigations have caught up with them. The lumps, bumps, persistent symptoms and pain points have reached the point where patients want them looked into, and private healthcare offers an alternative route while NHS services rebuild capacity.
Private capacity does not replace the NHS. It absorbs demand that would otherwise sit on NHS waiting lists, freeing the NHS to focus on patients without the financial means to access private care. The private sector's commercial growth and the NHS's capacity recovery are complementary outcomes, not competing ones.
Why is younger demographic interest in self-pay rising?
Georgina's perspective is that this generation has grown up with frictionless access to goods and services, and they are bringing those expectations to their health. They are not willing to put their lives on hold for waiting lists, and self-pay offers a way to avoid that. The London Clinic has seen a particular rise in younger professionals using self-pay for cancer diagnostics, where speed of investigation matters most.
The implication for the wider sector is that the historic image of the private healthcare patient, older and wealthier, is incomplete. The new self-pay user is more demographically broad, more digitally comfortable, and more outcome-focused than the audience that private healthcare marketing has historically been built for.
How should the sector communicate with younger self-pay patients?
Georgina argues for a shift in service positioning. Rather than focusing on treatments associated with older audiences, hip replacements, cataract surgery, the sector should make age-related health screening, therapy services and preventative pathways visible. Younger patients want preventative engagement, not single-treatment intervention, and the marketing language should reflect that.
Channel matters too. Younger audiences absorb information through social platforms, podcasts and video content, where older audiences default to print and longer-form online content. A private healthcare communication strategy that ignores the demographic-specific channel mix will under-convert one or both audiences.
What is the financing gap private healthcare needs to close?
Spreading the cost of treatment is a normalised consumer expectation in retail, and Georgina argues it should be the same in healthcare. Many would-be patients hesitate to engage private healthcare because of the perception of an upfront cost barrier. That perception is often inaccurate, but the perception itself is the conversion barrier.
Communicating financing options openly, structured payment plans, instalment models, treatment-cost transparency, gives patients permission to consider private healthcare who would not otherwise. Encouraging patients into debt they cannot afford is not the goal. Helping patients understand that private healthcare is more accessible than they think is.
How does technology fit into the self-pay future?
Wearable health technology is one of the threads running through the conversation. Younger patients are using wearables to take ownership of their day-to-day health monitoring, and the data those devices produce will increasingly inform their decisions to seek treatment. Private providers integrating with wearable data, both for diagnostic input and for ongoing patient monitoring, will be better positioned for the next generation of self-pay patients than providers operating in a closed clinical environment.
Self-pay healthcare is becoming more accessible, more digitally enabled, and more demographically broad. Providers that respond to this with personal service, transparent information, and 24-hour access infrastructure will find the patients who are now ready to use them.
This conversation was recorded between Rare. and Georgina Bishop, Head of Self-pay at The London Clinic, following the publication of the joint What's happening to self-pay in healthcare? report.
