Stop health tourism

Speaking after the Stafford hospital scandal in 2010, the then newly appointed Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley, grandly announced plans for a charter to support whistleblowers. The government, he said, would ‘create an expectation that NHS staff will raise concerns about safety, malpractice and wrongdoing as early as possible’.

We now know just how that fine pledge worked out. In 2013 this magazine ran a piece by J. Meirion Thomas, then a cancer specialist at the Royal Marsden hospital in London, about his concerns at how the NHS was being exploited by health tourists. He had tried, he said, to expose an ineligible foreign patient but had as a result been accused of unethical behaviour.

Meanwhile, the scale of health tourism in the NHS is becoming clearer by the day. Junior NHS managers have spoken of being ignored or being branded ‘racist’ by senior staff for daring to raise the issue. Hospitals, knowing that they are treating health tourists, refuse to admit them as such because they know they will then not be fully compensated by the NHS for the treatment they have given.