Hit squads of debt collectors are being sent into hospitals to get money from health tourists
Jeremy Hunt is toughening up the NHS stance after a report reveals it fails to get back the millions of pounds it spends on treating overseas patients
DEBT collectors will be sent into hospitals to get payment from health tourists as the NHS is failing to get back millions of pounds it spends on treating overseas patients.
A damning report by the National Audit Office (NAO) reveals NHS Trusts collected just £255million of at least £500million it spent treating foreign patients last year.
The failure to collect the cash is partly because half of doctors and a quarter of nurses do not think it is their duty to ensure overseas visitors are charged.
And the NAO reveals eight of England’s specialist and acute NHS trusts failed to collect payment from a single overseas patient who received free treatment, to which they were not entitled.
reports “debt collectors” will be sent into such trusts as part of a Government crackdown.
At the moment overseas patients are only charged for non-urgent care and ministers want to take the charging much further.
They are proposing to start charging overseas patients who use accident & emergency departments, ambulance services, maternity units and GPs.
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt said he is determined to ensure the NHS was not "abused";.
He said: "We consulted earlier this year on extending the charging of migrants and visitors using the NHS to other areas of healthcare.
“We will set out further steps in due course to ensure we deliver on our objective to recover £500million a year by the middle of this Parliament."
And the head of the NAO Amyas Morse said: “Hospital trusts remain some way from complying in full with the requirement to charge and recover the cost of treating overseas visitors.”
The Government introduced measures two years ago to get the money back from overseas patients who are not entitled to free care.
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A target of getting £500million back by 2017-2018 was set but the NAO report says last year the NHS did not even manage to get half of that.
Health services tried to charge £289million for such costs and only managed to get back £255million of this.
The NAO report said the NHS will miss the £500m target for 2017-2018 by more than £150million.
To try and stop this happening squads of specialist accountants, former doctors and managers will be sent into NHS hospitals.
Their job will be to make them better at identifying patients who should be paying for treatment and getting money from them.
One hospital trying to crackdown is St George’s in Tooting, south London, where the maternity unit was used by around 900 pregnant health tourists last year – with deliveries from non-EU women making up a fifth of all births.
It is now running a Home Office pilot scheme where the mums have to hand over their passports before they give birth.
Under the new “debt collector” system the NHS has three sets of charges.
It should get money back from EU countries for patients who live in the European Economic Area (EEA) – just as the other countries charge Britain when we are treated abroad.
As well as this it is supposed to charge all visitors from outside the EEA.
And last year it introduced a surcharge which charges £200 a year to students and temporary migrants for healthcare.
An NHS Improvement spokesman said: “At a time when the NHS faces tough financial challenges, we want to support trusts ensure that those who must pay for the treatment they receive do so.
“We are working to identify those within the NHS who have real experience and skills in this area, and putting them into teams to offer additional support to some of our trusts in areas with high numbers of overseas visitors.”