I had lunch with a private health CEO, and now I understand why the NHS must stop reading its own MRIs

BY: @op_ed_columnistMAY 25, 2026

FIG. 01 Two men in suits dine at the Garrick Club while a woman in pale blue NHS scrubs and a stethoscope stands tableside holding a silver cloche.

The exhausted public-sector radiologists whining about 'lower-quality' private reports completely miss the sheer economic elegance of paying a third party double the cost to do half the work.

I was enjoying a rather spectacular Dover sole at the Garrick Club last Tuesday with Julian, the managing director of a boutique outsourced diagnostic firm, when the topic of the National Health Service’s latest artificial “crisis” naturally arose. Apparently, there is widespread public sector hand-wringing over the record £241 million the NHS spent last year paying private companies to analyze MRI and CT scans.

The usual suspects—exhausted public hospital radiologists, union representatives, and people who insist on surviving treatable illnesses—are up in arms. They claim that this ballooning cost is the result of a short-sighted failure to train enough doctors, forcing hospitals to rely on what they rudely call “lower-quality” private scan reports. But as Julian patiently explained to me over a truly sublime Sancerre, the real problem is the NHS’s archaic, stubborn obsession with doing things itself.

FIG. 02 The only real solution to the public health crisis is trusting the people who stand to profit from it the most.

We must ask ourselves a difficult question: why are we clinging to the nostalgic fantasy of a trained, on-site medical professional reviewing our internal organs? It is the twenty-first century. We outsource our food delivery, our transport, and our dog walking. Why should my potentially malignant lung nodule be entirely reliant on a salaried government employee when it could be synergized by a dynamic private equity portfolio company?

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Guardian World · theguardian.com

NHS spends record £241m outsourcing scan analysis to private firms

Radiologists say ‘ballooning’ costs reflect staffing failures, forcing a reliance on lower-quality private scan reports The NHS is paying private firms record sums to analyse diagnostic scans because hospitals are too busy and understaffed to do the work themselves, research has revealed. The amount being spent on outsourced the interpretation of CT and MRI scans is “spiralling out of control” and reflects a short-sighted failure to train enough doctors, ministers are being told. Continue reading...