UK crack down on Nigerians who are abusing NHS read the shocking full story from daily mail

The health tourist 'hit and runners' who rip you off... with £24million in unpaid NHS bills as abuse of free care by non-EU patients doubles in just one year
Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt promises crack down after Mail On Sunday investigation

The biggest offenders – in order – are from Nigeria, Poland, British expats, Portugal, Bangladesh, and Pakistan.
The departments most affected are maternity, ophthalmology, radiology, oncology, gynaecology and cardiology.
Some women come here specifically to give birth. They lie to get on the flight, saying they are less than seven months pregnant when they are not. When they land they say they are eight months, so no airline will take them back.
Sometimes flying this late triggers early labour, so they go straight to hospital

Promise: Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt has said that the Government will crack down on 'hit and runners' following the Mail on Sunday's investigation
Foreign health tourists have left the NHS with a £24 million unpaid bill in just one year, a Mail on Sunday investigation has found.
The sum owed by overseas patients taking advantage of Britain’s free hospital care has doubled in 12 months, according to new data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI).
Last night, following our investigation, officials told The Mail on Sunday that Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt would within days be announcing major plans to crack down on the ‘hit and runners’.
Mr Hunt said: ‘I’m clear we must all work together to protect the NHS from costly abuse. We want a system that is fair for the British taxpayer by ensuring that foreign nationals pay for their NHS treatment.’
This newspaper’s enquiries have established that:
Fear of being labelled racist means NHS staff are reluctant to confront health tourists, according to a whistleblower.
For every £100 the NHS spent on caring for health tourists last year, only £23 has been paid back.
One individual cost the NHS £217,000 – but not a penny has been repaid.
Six hospital trusts in London are owed more than £1 million and another 23 across England are owed at least £100,000.
These unpaid bills are ‘just the tip of the iceberg’ because the checking system is so flawed that most health tourism goes undetected, says a leading surgeon.

Expensive: The sum owed by overseas patients taking advantage of Britain¿s free hospital care has doubled in 12 months, according to new data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FoI)
The Mail on Sunday obtained figures from 120 hospital trusts on how much they had spent caring for overseas visitors identified as being chargeable.
The other 40 said they did not collect the information, or failed to respond to our FoI request.
This newspaper also asked for figures on how much each trust was still owed by these patients. Data was requested for the last two financial years, 2011/12 and 2012/13.
The amount these 120 hospital trusts billed such patients grew from £24.7 million to £30.9 million over that period – a 25 per cent increase.
But the total unpaid bill – likely to be written off – more than doubled from £9.9 million to £23.8 million.
The new figure is equivalent to £1 for every UK income tax payer per year. The figure includes 20 trusts which gave cumulative debts across both years.

Health tourist: Bimbo Ayelabola, who came to Britain 'on a family visit' from Nigeria when pregnant and gave birth to quintuplets costing the NHS £200,000

The famous five: Bimbo Ayelabola's picture of her quintuplets

London hospital trusts have the biggest unpaid bills: all six with £1 million or more outstanding are found inside the M25.
Barts and The London NHS Trust, which runs six hospitals, topped the 2012/13 list. Its unpaid bill exceeded £3.5 million. This includes some debt carried over from the previous year.
The others are: Kings College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust (owed £2.1 million), Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (£1.6 million), Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (£1.3 million), Epsom & St Helier University Hospitals NHS Trust (£1.25 million), and North West London Hospitals NHS Trust (£1.2 million).



Yet the problem is not confined to the capital. Hospital trusts in Buckinghamshire, Nottingham, Leicester, Teesside, Cambridge, Essex, Gloucestershire, Kent, Norfolk, Surrey and Sussex all have unpaid health tourism debts greater than £100,000.
Professor J Meirion Thomas, a leading NHS cancer surgeon who has campaigned to get the issue taken more seriously, said: ‘These startling new figures show the problem of health tourism is escalating and that Ministers have failed to grasp the nettle.’
He added: ‘While £24 million is a lot of money, I believe it is only the tip of the iceberg. The true cost runs into billions of pounds every year.’
The £24 million figure only related to those who had admitted to being chargeable patients, or had been found out, he explained.

‘The majority of health tourism is unrecorded because it’s so easy to get an NHS number and claim you have the right to hospital treatment, and because the systems for checking ineligibility are so poor.’
He continued: ‘Most hospital trusts employ people to check if patients are entitled to free care, but they are under-resourced. In addition, NHS culture is to treat and not ask if a patient is eligible for free care.
'Last week the British Medical Association reiterated its position that doctors should not act as the UK Border Agency.

Costly: St Barts Hospital in London had the highest unpaid bill
‘This culture might seem laudable – but it is costing the taxpayer dear.
‘But it is not just a money issue – in some places it is having an impact on capacity. These are not trivial matters: we are talking about timely access to cancer treatments or renal dialysis, and whether or not there is room on the labour ward.’
Prof Thomas offered to carry out a ‘quantitative review’ of health tourism to estimate its total cost to the NHS, but was rejected by a senior Department of Health official.
Mr Hunt has now just commissioned such a review, but Prof Thomas was not asked to contribute.

The Nigerian with leukaemia
We get letters from patients’ solicitors, which usually go down the Human Rights Act route, and people panic.
We have to deal with very complex legal issues, which can be hard when you don’t have management’s support. We really feel out on a limb.
But we treat everybody exactly the same, whether they are black, white or Asian, or if their name is Smith or Mohammed.
One of the big groups we tackle is actually British expats who come back just to get treatment.
They present with their old NHS number – which is usually a sign someone is eligible for free care – and use their old UK address. That makes them very difficult to detect.
Another group is people from outside the EU, issued with four- to six-month visit visas, who come to the UK purely to access free NHS hospital care.
They come with very complex pre-existing conditions that can be very expensive to treat.
But they go to a GP, get registered and are automatically given a permanent NHS number.
In the last year we have identified nearly 200 chargeable patients. Four out of five had NHS numbers.