If you are unlucky enough to be taken by ambulance from a private hospital to an NHS one, it is probably fair to say the brochure phase of your healthcare journey has ended.
Private hospitals are meant to offer clean corridors, shorter waits and a dessert trolley whose ambitions stretch beyond a single flavour of jelly.
They are also being used more often to treat NHS patients, as ministers try to cut waiting lists without going through the tedious business of creating more NHS capacity.
So I wanted to know how often patients treated outside the NHS end up being rushed back into it when something goes wrong.
That meant sending a Freedom of Information request to NHS England for Hospital Episode Statistics data on emergency admissions where the patient had been transferred from a private or non-NHS hospital.
The useful detail was in the coding: admission method 2B records an emergency transfer from another provider, while admission source 87 records that the patient came from a non-NHS hospital.
Together, they gave a way to count emergency transfers from private providers into NHS hospitals.
The numbers were heading in the wrong direction.
There were 477 transfers in 2019/20. They fell during Covid, then rose again: 327 in 2022/23, 355 in 2023/24 and 435 in 2024/25.
NHS England also supplied provisional figures up to January 2026, which suggested 2025/26 could reach around 490 transfers. That would be the highest figure in the period covered.
In all, around 1,700 patients had been rushed from private providers into NHS hospitals for emergency care over five years.
The story ran in the Sunday Mirror on 26th April 2026.
Campaigners argued that the figures showed the NHS being left to clear up when private treatment goes wrong. The Independent Healthcare Provider Network said the transfers were extremely rare and accounted for only a tiny share of independent sector activity.
The figures did not prove that every private hospital is a trap with nicer curtains and magazines from the current decade.
They showed something narrower: when private-sector care needs emergency backup, the NHS is still the service waiting at the other end of the ambulance journey.
If you need someone who can make an NHS spreadsheet talk without first torturing the reader, get in touch.
