Women and Private Medicine

Abstract

The private market in health care in Britain expanded rapidly during the 1970s and 1980s, with growth in the numbers taking out private health insurance (Higgins, 1988), new building of for-profit hospitals (Davies, 1987) and the development of specialist services in areas such as psychiatry, alcohol treatment and health screening (Timmins, 1985). It has often been argued that these significant changes arose out of the rapid growth in occupational health policies being offered primarily to male white-collar workers. These were designed essentially to recruit and retain the workers and to enable them to return to the workforce as quickly as possible after episodes of illness. However, while this expansion may have occurred as a result of the growth in insurance programmes available to men, it appears that women have been the main users of private sector facilities (Horne 1984; Nicholl et al., 1989). In part this is because much of the expansion that has taken place in the private sector has been in areas that have particular significance for women and in which the NHS has provided an inadequate service for women’s needs, such as residential long-stay homes, fertility clinics and abortion services (Clarke et al., 1983). This does not explain why women should comprise a greater proportion of the patient population in the private acute hospital sector than men (Nicholl et al., 1989).