J. Meirion

How NHS health tourism is costing us billions: a surgeon’s story

Since blowing the whistle on systematic abuse of the NHS, I’ve heard from dozens of NHS colleagues. This is what they have to say.

When David Cameron proposed toughening the rules that govern foreign nationals being treated for free by the National Health Service, he faced — as one might expect — a barrage of criticism. The Prime Minister was accused of tilting at windmills. The threat exists only in the minds of xenophobes, said his critics. The actual levels of abuse are minimal, so why is he scaremongering? A few weeks earlier, I had written a piece for The Spectator from a different perspective; that of an cancer specialist who has spent his career in the NHS. I wrote for one reason only: that I cherish the NHS, and wish to stop its abuse.

My piece focused on the actual nature of the abuse, how it is carried out and why so little of it is detected. If a foreign national is impersonating a British friend (easy to do when no identification is required by GPs) then of course it will not show up in any statistic. I did not give too many examples. But since the publication of the piece, I have been overwhelmed with messages of support describing similar experiences and encouraging further investigation. It all adds up to clear, widespread abuse of our NHS by ineligible patients.

One of the first letters I received was from a junior hospital doctor working close to Heathrow airport. ‘Every single week, I see people who have been flown in from all over the world with a variety of extremely serious health problems,’ he wrote. ‘Many of these people had to be wheelchaired on to the plane because they were too unwell to walk on board. I understand the temptation to come to Britain, but we often have our Intensive Therapy Unit full of patients without NHS numbers who are there for weeks or months with no means or intention to pay, which impacts on our resources.

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