Is it worth paying for one private assessment while I sit on the pelvic health list?

I have been on the list since February and the last thing I was told was "later in the year", which could mean anything.

What I keep circling is whether to pay for a single private assessment. Not a course, not months of it, just one appointment with somebody who will actually look and tell me what I am dealing with, so that I am not doing random exercises off the internet for another six months.

The bit stopping me is that I have no idea whether that is money well spent or whether I will just be told to wait for the proper appointment anyway. And a small paranoid part of me thinks that if I go private they will quietly take me off the list, which is probably nonsense but I have not been able to get a straight answer.

Has anyone actually done this? Did the private person's findings mean anything to the NHS one afterwards, or did she start from scratch?

Nobody took me off anything. I asked before I booked and I would suggest you do the same, in writing if you can, because then it is answered rather than assumed.

I did exactly this last year and the honest answer is that it was worth it for one specific reason and not for the reason I thought.

What I expected to buy was a head start on the exercises. What I actually got was a name for what was going on, which changed everything, because I had been doing the wrong thing enthusiastically for months. The exercises I came away with were almost secondary to being told that the problem was not the one I had assumed.

What it did not buy was continuity. The person I saw privately was excellent and I saw her twice. Then I stopped, because a full course at that price was not happening, and I sat there with a plan and nobody reviewing it, which is its own kind of stuck. If I did it again I would want to be clear with myself that I was buying an assessment, not a course, and that the course was still coming from somewhere else.

Ask what the appointment includes before you pay for it. I assumed an assessment meant an examination and it did not, it was a very thorough conversation and a sheet, and I found that out at the end rather than the beginning.

Two separate questions in your post and they have different answers, so I want to pull them apart.

The first is whether paying knocks you off a public list. Nobody on this board has reported that happening, and Gerry's advice is the right one: ask the service directly and get the answer in writing rather than reasoning about it. What is genuinely worth confirming while you are asking is which list you are on, because the pelvic health queue and the general musculoskeletal queue are not the same queue and people are put on the wrong one more often than anyone admits.

The second question is whether one appointment is worth buying, and here is the thing I would want somebody to have told me. Access to this treatment works differently in every system and in ways that surprise people. In the UK it is free on the NHS with a wait, and pelvic health self referral exists in some trusts and not in neighbouring ones. Ireland's public guidance states both a referral route and a self referral route in the same paragraph, with availability varying by area. In the US the legal position is set state by state while the practical route usually runs through a doctor because that is what the payer requires. In Australia there is no pelvic health item in the Medicare schedule at all, so subsidy comes through a generic allied health item capped at five services a calendar year shared across every allied health profession, which is structurally shorter than the minimum course. In Canada it is a coverage question before it is a referral question, and Ontario funds physiotherapy only for defined groups. So "should I go private" is not one question with one answer, it depends on what your system was going to give you anyway. Getting referred to pelvic health physiotherapy sets out all five properly.

What I would say about the value of a single assessment, from my own three years of not having one: the assessment is the thing. I did not need better exercises, I needed somebody to establish what was actually happening, and until that happened I was guessing with great discipline. Where I would be careful is in expecting one appointment to substitute for a supervised programme, because it cannot, and the minimum course is measured in months rather than weeks. What happens at a pelvic health physio assessment covers what should be in it, and if you do book, questions to ask at your first appointment is the page I wish I had had.

And Lindsey's point deserves more attention than it will get. Ask what is included, ask whether an internal examination is offered, and ask whether you will leave with a written plan. Those three questions cost nothing and they are the difference between an assessment and a conversation.

Update. I rang, asked the list question, and it turns out I was on the musculoskeletal list, not the pelvic health one, which nobody had mentioned in five months of waiting.

That got corrected and I am now told October. I also booked the single private assessment and went last week. Findings were not what I expected and I have a plan I actually understand, and she wrote it down so I can hand it over in October rather than starting the story again.

So the useful thing turned out to be a phone call I could have made in March for free. The appointment was worth it too, but the phone call was the part that moved.