Help available to comply with competition legislation
Consultants are being encouraged by the Private Healthcare Information Network (PHIN) to get help from its consultant engagement team to provide fee and other data.
Anne Coyne
With Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) enforcement action being beefed up this year, Anne Coyne, PHIN’s consultant services manager, has this message for specialists:
‘Whatever your views on the CMA’s Private Healthcare Investigation Order – and we know for many of you they won’t be positive – the fact remains that consultants have a legal obligation to comply with the requirements it sets out – in particular Article 22: information on consultants’ fees.
‘The CMA has indicated it is going to step up its enforcement action in 2024, so simply ignoring the Order is not really an option.
‘But the good news is that compliance is a relatively easy thing to achieve and that PHIN’s consultant engagement team is here to help you.’
PHIN has warned private hospitals to speed up their work to comply with CMA guidance.
It says compliance has improved over the last quarter across the sector with more sites ‘achieving milestones’, but with the full compliance deadline of summer 2026 fast approaching, significant progress is needed across providers.