Immigrants (NHS Treatment)

Lord Soames of Fletching Excerpts

Monday 25th March 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hunt]

The directive to which the right hon. Gentleman refers was issued by an independent NHS body, not my Department. The sorry truth is that it is consistent with the current rules on access to primary health care, which is what we believe is wrong. I think that one of the big problems in the current system is that we have free access to primary care for anyone visiting the UK, however short their visit is. Through that access to primary care, they get an NHS number, which should not entitle them to free care but is often treated by hospitals as such. That is what we have to put right. He is absolutely right that we need a system that properly identifies whether people should have care that is free at the point of access without impinging on the ease of access for British citizens, which is one of the things they treasure most about the NHS.

[Nicholas Soames (Mid Sussex) (Con)]

Does my right hon. Friend agree that it is through access to primary care that the initial control must take place, but that all hospitals should have an overseas visitors manager who should be designated and required to collect overseas visitors’ moneys on a more regular basis and using a more joined-up and coherent way of working with the other agencies involved?

[Mr Hunt]

What my right hon. Friend says bears very careful consideration. He is absolutely right that primary care is a critical access point, and we need to look at that. We also need to look at the burdens we place on GPs. I think that ultimately the easy way we will do that is through proper digital patient records, which will allow NHS professionals to find out about the medical history of people accessing the NHS at any point, including whether they are likely to be eligible for free treatment.

With regard to hospitals, my right hon. Friend makes a very interesting point about an overseas visitors manager. One of the problems we have is that the incentives in the system positively disincentivise hospitals from declaring foreign users of the NHS. If they declare someone not to be entitled to free NHS care, they have to collect the money from that person themselves, whereas if they do not declare the person not to be entitled to free NHS care, they get paid automatically by their primary care trust or clinical commissioning group. The incentives in the system have acted to suggest that this is a much smaller problem than I believe it is.