How do I pay for private Atrial Fibrillation (AF) treatment in London?
If you are an insured patient you may need to get authorisation from your insurance company for your consultation. Please note that some insurers no longer fully cover modern treatments like catheter ablation and there may be a shortfall. Please feel free to discuss the cost of treatment with Cristina or the team at One Welbeck who will help to identify whether this is likely to be the case.
Insurers will sometimes try and direct you to non-specialist cardiologists in the hope that by not giving you access to definitive treatments like catheter ablation they will reduce costs. In the short term this is true but there is now evidence that catheter ablation is more cost effective than other treatments after 5 to 10 years.
If you are paying your own account then you would need to settle your account ahead of the consultation by credit card (the team at One Welbeck will help you with this).
For any hospital tests or treatments you will normally be required to make a payment before treatment. The hospital accepts all major credit cards, cash and personal cheques with a banker’s card.
How do I get NHS Atrial Fibrillation treatment in London?
Patients can ask their GP for a referral to St Barts. We are happy to see patients there under the NHS but you do need a GP referral (because it is the primary care trust that the GP works for who pay for your treatment). Most GPs are very helpful and are happy to do this using the NHS electronic referral system, but in the rare instance they are not it pays to be insistent because you are entitled to a choice in your treatment. (For Wales the arrangements are slightly more complex and it is more difficult to get NHS treatment in England. Patients will usually need to be referred by a teaching hospital and their specialist sought approval for funding first).
