Crowdfunding for medical expenses in the United Kingdom
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Background Medical crowdfunding is a rapidly growing phenomenon worldwide and a new means for patients to finance health related expenses. It raises many ethical concerns such as increasing inequities. In the UK, which operates a state-funded universal health care system, the phenomenon is unexpected and hasn't yet been studied. Our study aims at answering basic questions as who is using crowdfunding to fund health-related expenses, for what and why. Methods We have drawn the first 400 medical campaigns amongst 1,000 available on GoFundMe UK website. We used a content analysis method to extract data from narratives on age, sex, health condition and funds' purposes. Results Among the 400 campaigns, 1/2 requested funds for cancer care for both common and rare cancers, from which 1/3 disclosed a stage 4. A third of the sample sought funds to get treatment abroad, mostly in Germany and the US, for most part cancer therapies such as immunotherapy but also alternative therapies. A quarter of the sample sought support to alleviate financial burden associated with ill-health. Other purposes included getting private care in the UK (19%) and getting medical equipment (18%). Conclusions Our findings may put forward some gaps within the National Health Service (NHS) and social care such as issues to access therapies or equipment, lack of holistic care and inadequate welfare patient support. However, it does not explain fully the rise of crowdfunding that may also be a counterpart of patients' empowerment. For instance, patients can shift to the private sector, in the UK or abroad, when a treatment is not available within the NHS, such as high cost last-resort treatments for those with poor prognosis. We recommend policy makers to: use medical crowdfunding to inform policy,support patients to make empowered decisions,protect patients from commercial traps. Key messages Studying medical crowdfunding allows better understanding of patients’ perceived or actual unmet need for health and social care to inform policy development. This threat to equity should be addressed globally by providing patients with support to be empowered, with universal health coverage and by regulating better private facilities and health tourism.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.012 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".