If you require hospital treatment and decide to pay directly to be treated privately (because you do not have private medical insurance or are not covered in this instance by your insurance) you have the option of taking an active role in choosing a suitable hospital and determining the fee you will pay. Alternatively you can let your consultant or specialist make these decisions and arrangements for you.
If you decide to play an active role you will do so in partnership with your consultant or specialist. Once they have decided on the treatment or procedure you need, ask them to give you the OPCS code for the treatment, as well as describing it verbally. OPCS codes are set by the Government's Office of Population Censuses and Surveys as standard descriptions which identify all medical procedures. The codes are used to generate a range of medical statistics. They also allow non-medical personnel to give an accurate description to a hospital of a medical procedure, without needing to get involved in any medical language. The complete list is available from the The Stationery Office as a book called Tabular List of the Classification of Surgical Operations and Procedures, Fourth Revision (ISBN 0 11 691 295 2), but a list of the codes can also be viewed at WPA's XS health site by clicking here. This list also gives WPA's recommended fee rates to surgeons and anaesthetists for each procedure.
You can then produce a shortlist of hospitals which you and your consultant and specialist consider suitable. The CareHealth section on Assessing Hospitals may be of help. You can refer to the CareHealth Directory to check quality standards. Many hospitals have provided information for the directory on their most frequent operations, which gives an indication of their experience.
Then contact your shortlisted hospitals directly, explain that you would like a fixed price quotation for the treatment you need and give the relevant OPCS code. Self-pay patients can be offered very competitive rates because private hospitals on average have only 50% occupancy.