Healthcare UK scheme will allow NHS hospitals to set up profit-making branches abroad, say press reports

A joint 'Healthcare UK' scheme by the Department of Health and UK Trade and Investment (UKTI), the Government department which encourages investment overseas, will aim to link NHS hospitals with foreign governments which want access to UK health services, according to the BBC. The scheme, which is due to launch in the autumn, would see investment drawn from hospitals' work with private patients in the UK with profits reinvested in the NHS.

"We've often had international companies, organisations and countries come in to talk about the NHS, about how could we help, but we have never been very systematic about how we respond to those opportunities," deputy chief executive David Stout of member body the NHS Federation told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. "This is not about distorting what the NHS offers to UK citizens, this is about how we can exploit the brand of the NHS internationally."

Internationally, healthcare is worth an estimated $4 trillion, according to Stout, who said that the scheme could see the NHS "help bring in some of that income to both support the NHS locally and UK plc ... as something that generates income as well as generates spend".

Healthcare and infrastructure law expert Barry Francis of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com, said that the proposals – although not without risk – represented a "good opportunity" to improve NHS finances and further promote UK expertise. Concerns that the scheme would divert resources away from the UK seemed "quite the wrong way to look at this", he said.

"Private patient ventures within the NHS in the UK generate revenues and sophisticated joint venture models such as those used by The Christie Hospital and HCA International in Manchester point the way to generating revenues to benefit the NHS and enhance expertise rather than damage the interests of NHS patients," he said. "In times of austerity a public sector instinct may be to concentrate on cuts in service, but the potential for expansion outside the UK represents a much more optimistic approach - how to increase revenues and maximise the use of resource to everyone's benefit."

He added that there was an "appetite for UK expertise" around the world including Asia Pacific and the Gulf, as more countries sought to treat patients in more sophisticated 'local' hospitals rather than send patients to the UK, Germany or USA for treatment. Hospitals with the most to gain from the initiative would be those "already recognised internationally as centres of expertise" such as Great Ormond Street Hospital or the Royal Marsden.

However patients' groups criticised the announcement, with Katherine Murphy of the Patients Association describing it as a "distraction".

"The guiding principle of the NHS must be to ensure that outcomes and care for patients comes before profits," she told the Independent. "At a time of huge upheaval in the health service, when waiting times are rising and trusts are being asked to make £20 billion of efficiency savings, this is another concerning distraction. The priority of the government, hospital trusts and clinicians should be NHS patients."

In a statement provided to Out-Law.com, Health Minister Anne Milton said that the proposals would in fact mean "good news" for NHS patients, who would "get better services at their local hospital as a result of the work the NHS is doing abroad and the extra investment that will generate".

"This is also good news for the economy which will benefit from the extra jobs and revenue created by our highly successful life sciences industries as they trade more across the globe," she added. "The NHS has a world-class reputation, and this exciting development will make the most of that to deliver real benefits for both patients and taxpayers."