Cross-border Healthcare

David Smith Excerpts

Tuesday 4th November 2025 Westminster Hall

[David Smith (North Northumberland) (Lab)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Dowd. I congratulate the hon. Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe (David Chadwick) on securing this important debate—one that is very important to my constituents in North Northumberland.

A constituent of mine recently visited friends in the north of the county, near the border with Scotland, and sadly suddenly collapsed with a brain tumour. He was taken across the border to a Scottish hospital. But this hospital, as we have heard, could not diagnose him because it could not access English medical records. Imagine the scene: this constituent’s wife is now filling in her husband’s records from scratch, over the phone, while he waits and waits for an MRI that he cannot get in Scotland because he is under the care of Northumberland healthcare trust.

I am alarmed to realise that our country seems to have several invisible lines running through it. If someone has a stroke, heart failure or even a nasty cold on the wrong side of those lines, their illness and treatment come with strings attached. That is bad for my constituents and bad for our country. My constituents, like so many, live cross-border lives—that is just their reality. They move across the border all the time to see friends, to go shopping and to seek medical treatment. But as we have seen, if they take ill on the wrong side of the border, they will receive substandard treatment at times. That is not because there is anything wrong with the service of Scottish nurses or doctors—they are superb—but because they have no access to English medical records. There is no joined-up thinking.

Northumbria NHS foundation trust recently tried to offer the services of a new infirmary in Berwick to patients on the Scottish side of the invisible line, but up to now there has been a lack of take-up or interest from NHS Borders—something I hope to see change. The primary-secondary care link is in a bit of a black box. Patients have no idea where they will be referred by their GP. Will it be Melrose, Cramlington or Newcastle? Who arranges the appointment determines which organisation provides the referral.

It does not have to be this way. The technical solutions clearly exist, as we heard from the hon. Member for Brecon, Radnor and Cwm Tawe, but the SNP Government in Edinburgh frankly have no incentive to make cross-border care work. I am sad to see no SNP Members here today. They are ideologically opposed to the choices that could lead to a cross-border, British healthcare system that serves all British people equally.

It is worse than that. I was recently contacted by a young constituent who lives in North Northumberland, in the north of England, and works in the Scottish Ambulance Service. They hope to take up further training in Scotland so that they can continue employment, but the Scottish funding support will not cover them because they are not Scottish, and the English support will not cover them because they want to study in Scotland. A British student who wants to study at a British university in order to save British lives cannot do so. That is a farcical situation.

This is the reality for many of my constituents. We must get better at joining the dots and realising that real people live holistically in the geography of where they are, which should not be determined by what are, in British terms, invisible lines on the map. If that is the situation now, imagine the mess for healthcare if the SNP were successful in its policy of independence. Because of bad cross-border healthcare my constituents are suffering, and the Union that so many of us cherish is suffering too.