Dr. Donal O'Hanlon:

That cannot be the case. Whether one likes it or not, one cannot make a like-for-like comparison between private and public hospital care provision. We have spoken today about balancing the books in terms of pluses and minuses. We probably need to look, too, at logistic regression, a range of confounding variables and projections and very complex health economic models. The demographic and socioeconomic status of the two groups of patients who come to the two different types of hospitals must be taken into account, as well as the acuity of each type of patient, the case mix and the requirement for multiple models of multidisciplinary care for the different patient groups. The differences are such that one cannot make a direct comparison between them. It would simply be bad economics and bad research to do so. Indeed, if a research paper came to me as a reviewer which contained that type of comparison, I would reject it.