So you say they have their time split between NHS and private care, however if private care didn’t exist surely that time wouldn’t need to be split and would solely be focused on public NHS care.
Unless they’re working over and above their 80+ NHS hours.
Apologies for the continued derailment, but this is quite wrong and misunderstands the situation somewhat. When consultants are seeing private patients, they are indeed doing it over and above their NHS work. I think with your 80+ hours thing you may just be confusing consultants with junior doctors. Consultants are not doing 80 hours a week for the NHS, or in total!
You may not have noticed, although it’s been in the news a bit over the last few years, but the NHS is a bit financially constrained at the moment. If you stopped the consultants doing private work, they would just need fewer of them, because there’s a finite amount of money for them.
As I said previously, the private work isn’t instead of the NHS work, it’s in addition. Oh, and if you stopped them doing private work, you’d lose a load of them, so I suppose that could pay for the increases for those that are left. Still doesn’t create any new capacity though, just rearranges it.