Westfield Health is a Sheffield-based not-for-profit health and wellbeing provider founded in 1919, with around 400,000 customers and more than 8,000 business clients. It offers two main products: health cash plans, which pay money back towards everyday costs like dental, optical, physiotherapy and prescriptions; and a more unusual product called hospital treatment insurance — sold as Surgery Choices — which covers private treatment for a defined list of non-urgent operations. As a not-for-profit it reinvests surpluses and has donated over £15 million to health causes in the last two decades.

No — and this is the most important thing to understand. Westfield’s products are a health cash plan and a hospital treatment insurance product, not comprehensive private medical insurance. Surgery Choices covers a defined list of non-urgent operations with lifetime benefit limits, and outpatient cover is an optional add-on rather than standard. It does not provide the broad acute cover of full PMI from insurers like Bupa, AXA or Aviva — most notably, it is not built around cancer cover pathways. For a defined-list surgery product it can be far cheaper than PMI; it is simply a different, smaller product.

Westfield’s individual health cash plan, with five cover levels from around £8.58 per month, pays money back up to annual limits for optical (eye tests, glasses, lenses), dental, therapy treatments including physiotherapy, acupuncture, chiropractic, osteopathy and homeopathy, chiropody, prescription charges and GP-referred diagnostic consultations. It also pays fixed cash amounts for hospital stays, day surgery and the arrival of a new baby, plus extras like a 24-hour advice and counselling line, gym discounts and a rewards scheme. There is no excess, dependent children are typically included free, and claims are made online.

Surgery Choices is Westfield’s hospital treatment insurance — a category it introduced to the UK market. Level 1 covers more than 60 non-urgent operations up to a lifetime limit of £100,000, and Level 2 covers a wider range of procedures with a higher limit. Covered procedures include the classic long-wait operations: hip and knee replacements, cataracts, varicose veins, slipped discs, tonsil and prostate procedures. An optional outpatient add-on provides up to around £1,000 a year towards specialist consultations and diagnostic scans. It gives genuine private treatment for listed procedures — but only for listed procedures, which is the trade-off against full PMI.

Individual health cash plans start from around £8.58 per month at the entry level, rising across five levels as claim limits increase; workplace versions start lower. Adding hospital treatment insurance to a cash plan has been offered in workplace schemes from around £14 per month combined. Standalone Surgery Choices pricing depends on age and the level chosen. For comparison, comprehensive private medical insurance averages around £80 per month for a single adult — Westfield’s products are deliberately smaller, cheaper tools doing narrower jobs.

It depends which product and what you’d use. The cash plan follows the standard cash-plan arithmetic: if your household reliably spends on dental, optical and physio and would actually claim, the maths can work; if you rarely claim, you’re pre-paying bills you don’t have. Surgery Choices is more distinctive — for someone whose main worry is a long NHS wait for a listed operation like a hip replacement or cataract, it offers private access at well below full PMI prices, with the honest trade-off that anything outside the procedure list, including most cancer treatment pathways, is not what it does. Neither product substitutes for comprehensive PMI if broad acute cover is what you actually want.

Westfield Health is a not-for-profit organisation — it has no shareholders, reinvests surpluses in services and charitable giving, and has operated from Sheffield since 1919. It is authorised by the Prudential Regulation Authority and regulated by both the Financial Conduct Authority and the PRA, with financial services registration number 202609. Its registered office is Westfield House, 60 Charter Row, Sheffield S1 3FZ.

Westfield and Simplyhealth are the two biggest names in UK health cash plans, both with not-for-profit roots reaching back to the 1870s–1910s hospital fund movement. The cash plans themselves are similar in shape — cashback for dental, optical and therapies across several levels. The genuine difference is Westfield’s Surgery Choices hospital treatment insurance, which covers actual private operations from a defined list — something Simplyhealth doesn’t offer, with Simplyhealth’s distinctive asset instead being its ownership of the Denplan dental network. Which suits an individual depends on whether everyday cashback or listed-surgery access is the priority.