Haemorrhoid Treatment on the NHS or Privately: Waiting Times and How to Decide
The Question Behind the Question
Almost nobody starts by asking whether to go private. They start by asking whether the thing they have been putting up with for two years is ever going to get dealt with. The NHS treats haemorrhoids, it treats them well, and it treats them free at the point of use, so the sensible first move is always to see your GP. What people find harder to get a straight answer on is what happens after that: whether they will be referred at all, what they will be offered if they are, and how long the whole thing will take. Those three questions are what this page is about. The honest position, set out below with the figures and the policies behind it, is that for a benign, non-urgent condition the NHS route is free but slow and rationed, and the private route is fast and chosen but paid for out of your own pocket. Neither is the right answer for everyone, and this clinic has an obvious commercial interest in one of them, so we have tried to state the case for both accurately and let you weigh it.
What the NHS Actually Offers for Haemorrhoids
The NHS pathway is a staircase, and most people are meant to stop partway up it. Step one is your GP, who will take a history, usually examine you, and start with conservative management: more fibre, more fluid, softer stools, less time straining on the toilet, and a topical preparation for symptom relief. A large majority of people never need to go further, because mild haemorrhoids genuinely do settle with this. Step two, if symptoms persist, is referral to a colorectal or general surgery outpatient clinic, where you are examined properly and offered an outpatient procedure — most commonly rubber band ligation, sometimes sclerosant injection or infrared coagulation. Step three, reserved for a minority, is surgery under anaesthetic: excisional haemorrhoidectomy, stapled haemorrhoidopexy or haemorrhoidal artery ligation. All of that is available on the NHS, it is delivered by the same colorectal surgeons who work in the private sector, and the quality of the clinical work is not the variable here. Access and timing are.
The Part People Do Not Expect: The NHS Rations This Deliberately
Haemorrhoid surgery is classified by most commissioners as a procedure of low clinical priority, which means it is not routinely funded and is only paid for when a patient meets published criteria. NHS Somerset ICB, to take one policy that is public and typical of many, will only consider surgical treatment where conservative treatment has failed and the haemorrhoids are recurrent, or there is persistent bleeding, or they cannot be reduced. Its policy also states plainly that clinicians should assess patients against those criteria before referring, because referring someone who does not meet them costs an outpatient appointment and, in the policy's own words, inappropriately raises the patient's expectation of treatment. This is not a local quirk. It follows the national Evidence Based Interventions programme, and comparable criteria-based access policies exist across England. The practical consequence is worth being clear-eyed about: symptoms that are miserable but not severe by these definitions — itching, discharge, a lump that goes back on its own, intermittent bleeding that has never been alarming — can be entirely genuine and still not clear the funding threshold. If your GP declines to refer you, that is very often policy rather than dismissal.
How Long the Wait Is, in Numbers
The figures move, so treat these as a snapshot rather than a promise, and check the current published data before making a decision on them. In England, NHS referral-to-treatment statistics for October 2025 recorded a waiting list of 7.40 million pathways covering 6.24 million people, with 62% waiting less than 18 weeks against a constitutional standard of 92% — a standard last met in September 2015. The median wait was 13.3 weeks, and around 171,000 people, roughly 2%, had been waiting more than a year. In Scotland the standards are different: 95% of new outpatients are supposed to be seen within 12 weeks and 100% treated within 12 weeks of a decision to treat. Public Health Scotland reported 63.6% of outpatient waits completed within 12 weeks in June 2026, up from 59.2% in March. Some boards publish far longer local figures for routine general surgery. None of this is a criticism of the people doing the work; it is the arithmetic of more referrals arriving each month than treatments completed.
Why Haemorrhoids Usually Wait Longer Than the Headline Figure
Two things make the average understate the wait for this particular condition. The first is triage. Colorectal services quite properly put suspected cancer first, then inflammatory bowel disease and other urgent work, and benign haemorrhoidal disease sits at the back of that queue. Within a specialty that is already missing its target, the least urgent conditions absorb most of the delay. The second is where the clock starts. The referral-to-treatment measure begins when your referral is accepted, not when your symptoms began, and for most people there is a long informal period before that: months or years of self-treating, then getting a GP appointment, then a trial of conservative management that has to fail before referral is even on the table. A patient who tells you they waited eight months for banding may in truth be four years into the problem. When you compare NHS and private timescales, compare the whole journey, not just the part that gets counted.
The One Situation Where You Should Not Be Weighing This Up At All
If you have new rectal bleeding and you are over fifty, a change in bowel habit lasting three weeks or more, unexplained weight loss, or a persistent feeling that your bowel has not emptied, this article does not apply to you yet. Those are red-flag symptoms, they go to your GP now, and they are handled on an urgent suspected-cancer pathway that moves in days rather than months. Most painless rectal bleeding does turn out to be haemorrhoidal, and haemorrhoids are far more common than bowel cancer at every age — but the two overlap enough in how they present that you cannot separate them from symptoms alone. A private haemorrhoid clinic is the right place for confirmed haemorrhoid disease. It is not the place for undiagnosed bleeding that has never been investigated, and paying for a treatment appointment is a poor way to skip a diagnostic one. If a private clinic seems willing to treat you without asking these questions, that is a reason to be more cautious, not less.
What Paying Privately Actually Buys
It is worth being precise, because the honest list is shorter than the advertising in this sector usually implies. Going private buys time: an appointment in days or weeks instead of a place in a queue. It buys certainty about when, which matters if you have to arrange leave from work or childcare. It buys choice of clinician and of location, and continuity, in that the person who assesses you is normally the person who treats you. It buys access to procedures the NHS does not commission. And it removes the criteria question, because you are not applying for funding. What it does not buy is a better surgeon — the consultants are frequently the same people — or a better outcome from the same procedure, or any guarantee at all. Anyone who tells you private treatment works better than the identical NHS procedure is selling. The genuine differences are speed, access and convenience, and for a condition that is not dangerous but is quietly wrecking your week, those can be worth a great deal or nothing much, depending entirely on your circumstances.
What It Costs, and Where the Money Goes
Private prices in the UK vary widely by procedure and provider. Rubber band ligation is at the cheaper end, commonly a few hundred pounds; consultant-led outpatient procedures sit in the four-figure range; and a haemorrhoidectomy under general anaesthetic in a private hospital is the most expensive option by some distance, because you are paying for theatre time, anaesthetist and a bed as well as the surgeon. A full breakdown, including how our own fees compare with the alternatives, is set out in our guide to how much haemorrhoid treatment costs. For this clinic specifically: an initial consultation with examination is £365, and treatment on the same visit is £1,095 in total. A follow-up treatment, if one is needed, is £795. Those are the current published prices at the time of writing, they are self-pay, and they are payable upfront. If treatment does not go ahead at all — because you are not suitable, or because you decide against it — the treatment portion of the fee is refunded. If treatment is started but not completed, it is not.
Insurance: Be Realistic About It
Private medical insurance sometimes covers haemorrhoid treatment and sometimes does not, and the variation is not always predictable from the policy wording. Many policies exclude conditions that pre-date the cover, and some treat benign proctology as a limited benefit. We do not have direct billing arrangements with insurers, so the practical route is that you pay the clinic and claim reimbursement afterwards. We provide an invoice and supporting documentation, and the procedure code insurers usually ask for is H5260, electrotherapy. Whether a claim succeeds is entirely a matter for your insurer, and outcomes genuinely vary — the same insurer can treat two apparently similar claims differently. Nobody here will tell you that your treatment will be covered, because nobody here is in a position to know. Ring your insurer before you book, quote the code, and get the answer in writing. If your policy does cover it, that changes the arithmetic on this page substantially.
Electrotherapy Is Not an NHS Option, and You Should Know Why
This clinic provides eXroid electrotherapy and nothing else, so it is only fair to say plainly where it sits in the NHS picture: it is generally not commissioned. NHS Somerset ICB, again as a published example, lists electrotherapy for haemorrhoids among the treatments it does not routinely commission. That is a funding decision made by commissioners about what to buy with a fixed budget, and it is not the same thing as a judgement that the treatment does not work. On the evidence position, precision matters more than enthusiasm. NICE has issued positive guidance on eXroid electrotherapy for grade 1 to grade 3 internal haemorrhoids. Grade 4 was not included, because there was insufficient evidence at the time of the 2018 review rather than because it was assessed and rejected; the equipment is approved in the United States for all four grades. Anyone who compresses that into "NICE-approved for all grades" is overstating it. If you want to understand where electrotherapy sits alongside banding, sclerotherapy and surgery, our comparison of non-surgical haemorrhoid treatments covers each of them in turn.
What the Treatment Involves, Without the Marketing
Since the practical question is usually what you would actually be paying for: a low-dose direct current is applied through a proctoscope to the base of an internal haemorrhoid, above the dentate line, where the anal canal has few pain-sensing nerve endings, which triggers a reaction that closes off the feeding blood vessel so the haemorrhoid shrinks over the following weeks. There is no cutting, no stitching, no general anaesthetic, no fasting and no bowel preparation. Up to three haemorrhoids can be treated in one session, and most people return to normal activities the same or the next day. Two things should be said clearly rather than buried. It is uncomfortable, and a fair number of patients describe it as properly painful while it is happening — around six or seven out of ten. It is short, it settles within roughly ten minutes of finishing, and the current can be turned down at any point. And you may need more than one treatment; how many cannot be predicted from an examination, and any clinic that promises you a number is overpromising. Outcome is not guaranteed, and complete clearance is not always achievable.
You Are Not Choosing One Forever
A misconception worth clearing up: paying for something privately does not forfeit your NHS entitlement. You can be assessed privately and treated on the NHS, or the reverse. You can go private for one episode and back to the NHS for the next. You cannot mix the two within a single episode of care — the NHS will not, for instance, pick up the follow-up for a private procedure as though it had done the operation — but nothing about seeing a private clinician removes you from an NHS waiting list you are already on, and you do not have to tell your GP to choose. This matters because it makes the decision smaller than it feels. A sensible and common sequence is to see your GP, get on the NHS list if you meet the criteria, find out what the local wait actually is rather than the national average, and then decide whether paying to be seen sooner is worth it to you, knowing the list is still there if you decide against.
A Practical Way to Decide
Five questions usually settle it. First, do you have red-flag symptoms? If yes, none of this applies — GP, now. Second, have you actually given conservative measures a proper run: fibre built up gradually, enough fluid, five minutes on the toilet rather than twenty, feet raised on a step? A meaningful proportion of people have not, and it is free. Third, do you meet your local NHS criteria — recurrent haemorrhoids, persistent bleeding, or ones that will not go back? Your GP can tell you. Fourth, what is the real wait where you live, not nationally? Ask, and ask which stage of the pathway the quoted figure covers. Fifth, what is a year of these symptoms worth to you? That last question is the only genuinely personal one, and the honest answer for plenty of people is "less than a thousand pounds", which is a perfectly reasonable place to land. If you want a rough sense of how severe your symptoms are before you decide anything, our severity test takes a couple of minutes and costs nothing. It is an indication, not a diagnosis — grade can only be established by examination.
If You Want to Talk It Through
We see patients in Glasgow and London, the service is self-referral so you do not need a GP letter to attend, and we can provide a report for you to share with your GP afterwards. What you would be booking is a consultation with examination, at which a colorectal or general surgeon establishes what you actually have — internal haemorrhoids and their grade, or a fissure, or something that needs referring on — and tells you whether treatment is appropriate. Some people who attend are not treated, either because the problem is not what they assumed or because a contraindication applies, and being told so is a legitimate outcome of the appointment rather than a wasted trip. If you would like to know what the visit itself involves before committing, our guide to what happens at a haemorrhoid appointment walks through it step by step, and our team can arrange an appointment when you are ready. If the answer for you is to stay on the NHS list, that is a good answer too.
Haemorrhoid centre London
93 Wardour Street
London, W1F 0UD
Haemorrhoid centre Glasgow
1 Blythswood Square
Glasgow, G2 4AD
Haemorrhoid centre Edinburgh
53 Dundas Street
Edinburgh, EH3 6RS
Tel: 020 3910 1601
Email: info@haemorrhoidcentre.com
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