Department of Health and Social Care written question – answered at on 20 February 2026.
Shivani Raja
Conservative, Leicester East
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what percentage of NHS patients in a) Leicester b) Leicestershire and c) the East Midlands were referred to private health providers for treatment in the last twelve months.
Karin Smyth
Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Independent sector providers have a role to play in supporting the National Health Service as trusted partners to recover elective services by using additional capacity to tackle the backlog whilst delivering value for money.
Data for NHS referrals into the independent sector is broken down by NHS commissioning regions. We are therefore unable to reliably calculate the percentage of NHS referrals into the independent sector at the levels requested.
Between January 2025 and December 2025, latest available data, there were a total of 3,637,634 new patient pathways for elective care in the Midlands region. Of these, 5.70%, or 207,268, were at independent sector providers.
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Secretary of State was originally the title given to the two officials who conducted the Royal Correspondence under Elizabeth I. Now it is the title held by some of the more important Government Ministers, for example the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs.
