Cost of MRI scan?
- Thread starter Energize
- Start date
Permabanned
Free through the NHS if you can blag a reason why you need one.
You can get them very quickly on the NHS if you are prepared to take any slot and there is a valid reason for having one. You can get them on the NHS in less than a fortnight if such alacrity is warranted.
However, if you are wanting to go private which I am thinking you are then what you would be looking at for a "bog-standard one" would be £400-500 because you would effectively need two areas scanned but they would not charge you the full price for both and you get a bit of a reduction. Shop around outpatients imaging departments will be cheaper than hospitals. But you may well be limited by your location (this I don't know as I refuse to have anything to do with private medicine) and also by who you want looking at your scan ie there is no point spending £500 to save money when the person you want to read the scan but will be charging £800. The information is only half the story it is who is reading that information and interpreting it that counts and how they then use that.
I am also assuming you just want a bog-standard scan as I don't know what you want it for and the reasoning behind that.
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I was in a car accident and physio said I probably have damaged ligaments and I have been having lower back problems and severe pain at times. The chances of getting an MRI on the nhs are slim I imagine and I don't want to wait centuries for it, besides the insurance company may cover the cost of it eventually its just a cash flow issue, 500 quid is no problem though. 
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Its not just going to be 500 quid - you'll likely need to go see an Orthopod first for a consultation, get him/her to send you for an MRI then have a followup appointment with them...
consultation fees could be 150+ for each of those appointments
and then what do you want - presuming the MRI shows something that could require treatment are you going to pay in cash for that too?
I'm not sure you can mix and match here - AFAIK either you use the NHS or you don't, don't think you can't just pay for an MRI/consultation and then ask your NHS GP to refer you to an NHS consultant and bring with you the MRI/diagnosis you paid for privately
consultation fees could be 150+ for each of those appointments
and then what do you want - presuming the MRI shows something that could require treatment are you going to pay in cash for that too?
I'm not sure you can mix and match here - AFAIK either you use the NHS or you don't, don't think you can't just pay for an MRI/consultation and then ask your NHS GP to refer you to an NHS consultant and bring with you the MRI/diagnosis you paid for privately
i've had similar scans done on the nhs and have never waited over 2 months.
I see no reason why you can't take the results of the scan to your GP? It's not like private healthcare where known conditions aren't covered.
I think you can mix and match, it saves the NHS money if you pay for a private scan from an NHS consultant after all. Once I was treated as a private patient on the NHS and had a CT scan!
I'm already undergoing private physio treatment arranged by the insurance, an MRI would be a treatment aid if nothing else. If anything else did need doing after the scan insurance would pay for it.
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I think it depends. I know of a few mad rules that going private then effects NHS funding. The one I know the most about is insulin pumps, sometimes if a patient gets their own the NHS will not fund the tubing and insulin. This isn't always the case but has happened. I've read about cancer patients wanting to try drugs the NHS will not fund but that they would stop getting funding for all drugs. I don't know of any test results the NHS will not deal with. Was just give some examples.
Associate
You may want a specialist radiographer to go over the MRI & write it up. That'll be about £250 or so. I had a head/neck/spine MRI (£500-600) then a neuro-radiographer wrote up the results(£250, though it could have been more), this was then given to the neurologist (£120). He then wrote to my GP & recommend the drug regime i needed. GP wrote the prescription.
Much fun.
In this case then you could ask for the scan to be performed privately to speed things up. The case given re pumps is when people get a different model to the one used by the trust and therefore they would have to subsidise incompatible models etc. You are however still assuming the scan is warranted.
The only way it would be fair is if the NHS only allow the use of private scans if the patient is then made to wait the same amount of time they would have had to wait if the scan was done on the NHS!
Otherwise people with money are cue jumping which is not cool or fair and completely against the whole FREE health care ethos imho.
Otherwise people with money are cue jumping which is not cool or fair and completely against the whole FREE health care ethos imho.
It frees up a direly needed NHS slot. It suits everyone.
We don't have free health care, ~18% of tax goes towards the NHS, so someone earning the average wage pays ~£1,100 per year towards the NHS out of their income tax even if they don't use it, VAT increases that amount further. And prescription charges make the NHS another £120,000,000 profit a year. Dentists and opticians are pretty much all private these days.
And why on earth would anyone go private if they had to wait the same amount of time?
That totally defeats the point in going private.By a patient going private the NHS saves a lot of money, possibly as much £1,000 in my case. This benefits NHS patients. It makes sense.
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Soldato
No it's not, if you breach the 8 week waiting list, the trust get's penalised. As someone said above, if you can get your GP to refer you to an orthopaedic specialist/consultant at your local hospital, they will most likely slap your name on the list.
I will be asking for a referral to an NHS consultant but it depends on how long I have to wait, for an injury like this an MRI needs to be done ASAP to document the damage for legal purposes if nothing else. I can't wait up to 8 weeks, during which time much of my injuries may heal. The physio also would need to see the scans and I have about 8 more sessions left.
Associate
All my scans i had done on Bupa were at private hospitals or at privately run MRI centres. You still dont get in instantly, was always a couple of weeks between consultant requesting the scan and me getting one. Had em done on NHS quicker than that.
Its not queue jumping, the whole going for a scan is done via private consultant. Dont know if a GP can send you for an MRI without first sending you to a consultant. Its always been the Neuro who has sent me for scans.