You may choose to pay for your treatment yourself. This usually includes the cost of treatment, drugs and all the care you receive. Cancer treatments can cost thousands of pounds so this would be a serious decision and one to discuss with your doctor and family or friends. Your doctor would still need to agree to prescribe the medicine or treatment.

When you agree to pay for your treatment privately, this only applies to the one condition. If you have private cancer treatment and then develop a totally different condition you could have it treated on the NHS or privately.

Private health insurance is also an option, but only if you have a pre-existing policy. Some policies do not include certain treatments for cancer or may not fund more than one course of this type of treatment. Your insurer will be able to give you more detailed information based on your individual situation.

Co-payment

Some insurance companies have produced policies to fund a drug or treatment that isn’t available on the NHS, which is given alongside another treatment. This is called co-payment. For example, a person may have their chemotherapy treatment on the NHS and then another cancer drug (which they couldn’t get on the NHS) privately. In theory, with co-payment you would only have to pay for the private treatment.

However, PCTs in England and in Wales have been told by the Department of Health that patients cannot have a combination of private and NHS treatment at the same time to treat one condition (like cancer). You either have to have all of your treatment on the NHS or pay for everything (treatments, drugs, care) privately.

In Scotland, patients cannot have private and NHS care together in NHS hospitals. The advice from the Chief Medical Officer about co-payment is that there should be good links with private hospitals. This is to make sure the treatment, which is being paid for, can be safely provided in a private hospital

There may be variations on how co-payment is dealt with across the UK. Before agreeing to any policies, talk to your specialist and find out what the situation is in your PCT or health board. Your specialist will explain how any requests to pay for all, or part of, your treatment are dealt with locally.