FAQs

Private Healthcare allows you to see us at the time of your choice and in the private hospital of your choice local to you without any delay, and usually the same week as your GP referral or your contacting our secretary.

All of your care, both at the time of your initial consultation and at all follow up visits, will be undertaken by one of our consultants personally.

We will be able to offer you all the latest treatments and diagnostic tests and all of this will be undertaken without any waiting lists (often on the day of your consultation) or at a time that is convenient to you.

All the private hospitals we work at pride themselves on their clean and comfortable surroundings, with private rooms and ensuite facilities for all patients. MRSA rates in the Private Hospitals we work at are NIL.

The nursing staff are caring and very experienced, and every effort is made by them and the hospital clerical staff to make your visit a pleasant and unflustered experience.

Small things like free and unlimited parking and waiting areas and clinical areas that are uncluttered, spacious and comfortable for all add to your whole hospital experience.

NHS waiting lists now operate within an ’18 week pathway’ from the time your GP refers you to when you are seen and treated in hospital, and most patients are seen and treated at the limits of this time frame. NHS Trusts locally and nationally are facing increasing difficulties in keeping within these targets, especially with the relative decrease in NHS funding planned for the next few years under current Government financial constraints.

Local NHS Hospital services are under no obligation as to which NHS hospital you are seen at or by which doctor you are seen by, as long as you are seen before this time period elapses – if patients are waiting too long to be treated in one particular hospital, your GP has to refer you to another Hospital in or outside the district until the waiting times drop again.

Many Ear, Nose and Throat operations (such as grommet insertion and particularly procedures seen as ‘cosmetic’ such as septorhinoplasty and rhinoplasty) are seen as ‘LOW PRIORITY PROCEDURES’ (or LPP ) and of dubious benefit by commissioning bodies in financially constrained times, despite their obvious beneficial effects for patients. They are now only available in very specific circumstances, and we can only see this list growing as commissioning bodies and the local Primary Care Trust (PCT) have to make large year on year savings for the foreseeable future.

For the reaction of surgical representative bodies to this, please see http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/mar/29/surgery-denied-nhs-trusts-cut-costs

Strictly speaking you don’t and we are happy to see patients without a referral letter if you wish to arrange your own consultation.

For those with Private Medical Insurance, please note that contacting your insurance company is mandatory before seeing us to allow you to claim on your insurance cover.

Many patients are now directed to see us as individuals by their Insurance companies, although you should specify who you wish to see if you have a particular preference.

In an ideal world however we would generally encourage you to see your GP prior to booking a consultation with us, to discuss your problems and to request a referral letter. This increases the chance that you will be seeing the correct person for your condition.

In particular, it is worth noting that many self-pay patients now don’t come via their GP (due to difficulty accessing their services), but via recommendation from their friends or previous patients of ours.

Yes you can, but the rules governing this are very much stricter than they used to be, to prevent patients being seen to be ‘jumping the queue’ for NHS treatment.

If you see us for a private consultation, if you then want to be transferred back to the NHS this has to be done via your GP, who can then if they wish re-refer you back to us in the NHS system once we have seen you.

All your notes and results from your private consultations will however be forwarded to our NHS Secretaries, so there will be no duplication.

We have specialist expertise in the management of nose and sinus related problems, and in Private Practice and our NHS practice have close working relationships with colleagues in allied medical and surgical disciplines who strive for such similar subspecialist excellence.

We have spent a large proportion of our careers, both in training and as a Consultants, developing specialist knowledge and surgical skills in nasal disorders and have worked with and trained under world experts in the field.

The function and shape of the nose are intimately related, and only an Ear, Nose and Throat Surgeon with training and an everyday interest in these issues can offer the most up to date and bespoke diagnosis and treatment for you.

Yes, Henry Sharp is happy to show you before and after pictures of patients who have had cosmetic nasal and ear surgery under my care.

Yes, Henry Sharp can show you what can (and can’t) be achieved by surgery on your pre-operative photographs by means of 2D digital image manipulation on a computer.

My Private Patients find this especially useful to see what they will look like after surgery, and it is a facility offered by only a handful of other ENT or Plastic Surgical colleagues in this country.

(see http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m0-NPaSp9no&feature=related for a similar 3D version used by a surgeon in Texas, USA.)