Unlike the growing trend of British citizens travelling abroad for medical treatment which they pay for privately or via their health insurance policies, a confidential internal report estimates the cost of treating patients from outside the European Union amounts to at least £62 million a year, according to The Times.
This figure is “bound to be an underestimate” as new rules that are supposed to prevent foreign patients abusing the NHS are being ignored, according to the report.
The NHS is obligated to treat anyone who requires urgent medical care. Patients from outside the EU are supposed to prove that they can pay for medical treatment in advance.
But a survey has discovered that NHS managers aren’t guaranteeing that patients prove their eligibility for free health care. The survey also suggests that only around half the debts are being chased, costing UK taxpayers more than £30 million a year. Only part of the £62 million is paid back by the patients.
The problem persists, despite the Government promising a crack-down on unpaid bills in 2004. Hospitals were told to make patients pay for their treatment if they were not residents in Britain or from countries with reciprocal arrangements. The Health Minister at the time, John Hutton, said in April 2004: “I expect trusts to make enforcement of the regulations part of their core business.”
Ministers have repeatedly said that statistics are not collected on the amount of patients being treated who are not entitled to free care and have frequently refused to state how much health tourism costs the NHS.
An internal investigation estimated the scale of the abuse after the new regulations were introduced. In September the Department of Health lost an 18-month struggle to stifle the findings of an internal report when they were revealed to Conservative MP Ben Wallace under the Freedom of Information Act.
As well as the first official estimates, the document also revealed that maternity and HIV services were being demanded the most. “Maternity . . . was frequently mentioned as an issue,” the report states. At the time, officials even suggested that the Government should contact air-lines to ask them to stop heavily pregnant women from Nigeria, India and Pakistan flying in to the UK.
According to the Telegraph, the largest single unsettled bill was for the treatment of a newborn baby, between December 2005 and March this year, at University Hospitals of Leicester. The care given to the child, which included four months in intensive care, cost the taxpayer £208,259.
Treatment for HIV was also “widely recognised to be a problem area” as many health workers were “hostile” to the idea of making foreign patients pay for their treatment. In one hospital, Department of Health officials discovered that the person responsible for checking patient’s eligibility “was not welcome” in the HIV ward.
In September, a spokeswoman for the Department of Health said that it refused to accept the conclusions of its own report, according to the Times. She claimed that the investigation was based on a sample of just 12 trusts. She added that the “situation is much better than it was three years ago” but admitted that figures could not be produced to prove it.
She also said: “We are in the middle of a review with the Home Office, which is looking at tightening up enforcement of the regulations.”
MP Ben Wallace, who exposed the report, told The Times: “This Government is conniving at a ‘Don’t ask, don’t charge and don’t chase’ policy that is leaving the NHS wide open to abuse.”

Family doctors may soon be able to tell patients how altering their habits may help them to live longer - with the associated implications for private health insurance and the potential for reducing premiums.

Dr Chris Martin, a researcher and GP in Laindon, Essex, has developed a computer program that can outline how long a person may live, depending on simple information such as smoking habits, age and blood pressure.

By next year, Dr Martin hopes to have refined the model to include factors such as stress and ethnicity. People from the sub-continent, for example, are more likely to develop cardio-vascular diseases.

The results of his model are displayed in a simple graph that shows how many more years a person can expect to live after making changes to their lifestyle. The graph can show, for example, greater changes in life expectancy if a patient were to give up smoking, which affects the risk of lung cancer and heart disease. The program can also display the benefits of other lifestyle changes, such as lowering blood pressure and cholesterol.

GPs already use a risk calculator to evaulate how likely individuals are to have a heart attack but this is typically based on percentages, which Dr Martin says a lot of the public do not understand. His program, which he calls the Laingdon Model, produces a picture of the risks and the effects that different changes in lifestyle would have on lowering them.

Results are not displayed in percentages, but on a set of curves on a computer screen. These graphs show how likely a person is to still be living at any future age, up to 85 and how the chances can be improved by lowering cholesterol, quitting smoking or making other changes.

The graph shows that without making any changes, the chances of living to be 80 years old are around 25 per cent. But giving up smoking could increase that chance to fifty per cent.

A different graph shows that controlling blood pressure would also benefit life expectancy, but this does not make as great a difference as smoking. For example, a person who does not control their blood pressure has an estimated 80 per cent chance of living to be 60, but this can be raised to just over 90 per cent.

Dr Martin told The Telegraph: “I came up with the idea primarily to scare people out of smoking. And, anecdotally, it seems to work in at least half of the cases.”

He suggests three furthur changes that will help increase lifespan. The most beneficial is eating lots of fruit and veg, which will help to reduce the risk of heart failure and cancer. Doing plenty of exercise will also help to reduce the chances of developig heart disease. And reducing your stress levels can also help. But he told The Telegraph that there are no guarantees: “I deal in probabilities. Diseases in the body are biological car crashes. Some smokers will live to 85: most won’t.”

He tested the system by using information from a previous study, on a sample of people in Whickham, near Newcastle upon Tyne. Data was gathered between 1972 and 1974 about a group of individuals, who were chosen to representative of the general population. The group were then followed up for 20 years by the original authors of the study.

Dr Martin fed this information into his model, which estimated how many of them would have still been living after 20 years. His model predicted 75 per cent, whereas the follow up study showed that 75.4 per cent of the group survived.

He expects the models main use will be for GPs and for health advice. “If you show patients a graph it really brings it home to them,” he told The Times.

The model is already in use in some doctors surgeries in South Essex, after being taken up by Health Enterprise East, the NHS Innovations Hub for the East of England.

Dr Martin’s model was the subject of his dissertation when he was studying a course a Health Informatics at University College London. The MSc course is designed to help medical workers use their IT skills to improve patient care.

Employers may put an end to health screenings and medical check-ups due to new income tax regulations, according to Employee Benefits & Health Insurance Magazine.

The warning follows an amendment to the Income Tax (Exemption of Minor Benefits) Regulations 2002, introduced by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

It states that health screenings will only be exempt from tax if they are available to all employees and medical check-ups must also be available to all staff, or those who are identified in a screening as requiring one.

Adrian Norris, managing director of Buck Consultants (Healthcare) told the industry publication, Health Insurance magazine, the amendment was a “bombshell”. He says extending screenings to all employees would create enormous costs for businesses.

He said: “Questions need to be asked about what the objective was behind the regulations, health screening is commonly described as executive screening because the majority of organisations only buy it for their senior staff as an executive benefit. HMRC seems to be operating in its own world and making its own judgments about how benefits and tax fit together.”

Chris Evans, head of health and risk development at PIFC Consulting, also told the magazine the regulations appear to be a “crude attempt” to encourage businesses to offer health screenings to all of their employees.

He suggested that the amendment could mean many employers will cut the services if they believe the tax burden outweighs the benefits.

But Dudley Lusted, head of corporate healthcare development at AXA PPP healthcare, said that it is not clear if all staff have to be given the same level of health screenings for them to be tax exempt.

He suggested that employers could offer cheaper screenings to all of their staff and more extensive screenings to their executive employees.

Furthermore, he said that not everyone would have to actually undergo the screening but it must be available to all staff or employers will face a tax charge.
He told Health Insurance magazine: “Unless the employer is willing to pay this tax, there will be a reduction in the number of employees taking up the benefit.”

Patients may soon be able to grow their own heart valves and muscles for transplants in the next few years, according to The Times and The Guardian.

British research team has grown a heart valve from stem cells for the first time. If animal trials prove successful later this year, the procedure may replace human donors for hundreds of thousands of people.

Leading heart surgeon, Sir Magdi Yacoub, has worked on ways to overcome the problem of donor shortages for more than ten years. Now he and his team at the heart science centre at Harefield hospital believe tissue engineering may provide the solution.

The team used chemical and physical nudges to encourage stem cells extracted from bone marrow to grow into heart valve cells. These cells were then placed into scaffolds made of collagen, which grew into 3cm wide discs of heart valve tissue.

Professor Yacoub told The Times “Currently people suffering from heart valve disease can be treated with artificial replacement valves – they do the job and save people’s lives but they are far from perfect. Although there has been huge progress in developing mechanical replacements, they still work mechanically and not physiologically – they cannot match the elegant sophisticated functions of living tissues.”

Using a person’s own stem cells to grow replacement valves would create a genetic match, so there would not be an immune response and patients should not require a lifetime of drugs to prevent complications. However, the patient might have to wait six weeks for the replacement valve to grow.

The development has brought science ever closer to the ultimate goal of growing entire replacement hearts. Professor Yacoub told The Guardian: "It is an ambitious project but not impossible. If you want me to guess I'd say 10 years. But experience has shown that the progress that is happening nowadays makes it possible to achieve milestones in a shorter time. I wouldn't be surprised if it was some day sooner than we think."