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Asylum access to NHS restricted

The BMA and a public health expert have rejected a tabloid claim that the NHS ‘faces being overwhelmed by hordes of patients of different nationalities when Eastern Bloc countries join the EU’.

The Sun said that ‘Home Secretary David Blunkett’s new legislation to stop benefit scroungers will not prevent so-called health tourists — many of them without a penny to their names’. According to the paper, many of the eight Eastern European states set to join the EU on May 1 ‘are in the grip of an HIV and tuberculosis crisis and sufferers will swarm to the UK in the hope of getting free treatment, it was forecast’.

But Martin McKee, professor of European public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine told healthmatters the claims had ‘no basis in what we know either about the epidemiology of infectious diseases in that region or the likelihood of people to move in the EU or the capacity of our healthcare system’. He added: ‘This is completely unfounded and has no evidence base whatsoever.’

His view was echoed by a spokeswoman for the British Medical Association. She told healthmatters there did not appear to be any evidence to suggest that ‘floods and floods of people’ were trying to access the UK health system and that claiming that this was going to be the case was ‘scaremongering’.

She said governments had to tackle problems with HIV and Aids in their own countries and it was ‘no good implying that we have a squeaky clean system and that people were going to bring in these diseases’.

Last month David Blunkett said incomers would be banned from collecting benefits for two years and a new system of work permits set up. As healthmatters went to press, the government said it was drafting amendments to the NHS overseas visitors regulations to include an end to free treatment for ‘failed asylum seekers and others with no legal right to be in the country’ to come into effect by April 1.