Doctors have said they will boycott attempts to introduce identification checks as part of government plans to combat “health tourism”.

Chris Wormald, the most senior official in the Department of Health, told MPs that he was looking at making hospitals check patients’ papers to find out whether they should be paying, a proposal he admitted was controversial.

It would mean that those trying to use health services in England, including British citizens, might have to prove their identity before having operations and undergoing tests in hospitals, but it would not cover care received at GP surgeries.



Doctors have reacted with fury to the plan, and have threatened not to implement it. Dr Simon Stallworthy described it as “disgusting”, saying it was not the role of the NHS to be “actively working to kick migrants out”.



In an email to the Guardian he added: “Many doctors would boycott it. The NHS is founded on the principle that healthcare should be free and accessible to all and that we, as doctors, make our decisions about what’s best for our patients without external influence or pressure. Being forced to become part of immigration services and actively blocking vulnerable people from accessing much-needed healthcare is fundamentally incompatible with the ethical and moral obligations placed on us as doctors.

“If migrants know that doctors and other healthcare professionals will actively liaise with the Home Office to deport them then they will avoid seeking healthcare. That’s hugely dangerous – especially in pregnant women, because without prompt early access to healthcare they stand a much higher risk of presenting as an emergency later on, potentially with much worse outcomes.”

What the hell? This is absolutely disgusting, the NHS should not be actively working to kick migrants out - https://t.co/3Nh4XTaXsR pic.twitter.com/TFwGyp1goT — SJ Stallworthy (@caremanmeow) November 22, 2016

Dr Ben White, one of the junior doctors who mounted an unsuccessful legal challenge to the imposition of new contracts, said:

Well, I won't be asking anyone for their passport before resuscitating them, thanks. pic.twitter.com/DkQ6udrVJr — Dr Ben White (@drbenwhite) November 22, 2016

Dr Natalie Silvey, an anaesthetic registrar, said:



"The health of my patient will be my first consideration"



Not their passport details https://t.co/vmolLG2pXp — Natalie Silvey (@silv24) November 22, 2016

Wormald told the public accounts committee that passport checks were already taking place at one hospital in Peterborough that treats a population with a high number of immigrants.

He accepted it was not part of “health service culture” but that it might be necessary to crack down on use of the NHS by visitors from abroad who do not have an automatic right to free care.



A National Audit Office report issued last month said the government paid out £674m to other European countries for the treatment of Britons abroad, but received only £49m in return for the NHS treatment of European citizens.

Prof Meirion Thomas, a former cancer surgeon at the Royal Marsden hospital who has campaigned against health tourism, welcomed the initiative. He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme he had recommended such a idea in a letter to the Department of Health in August 2015. “It will put the message out there that the NHS is not open to health tourism, that when you come here you will be checked for eligibility,” he said.



But Thomas pointed out that it would not stop maternity tourism. He said: “Ladies arrive in this country in the late stages of a pregnancy and they don’t declare themselves a month before the expected date of delivery and no airline will fly [them home] so they become what’s called ‘immediately necessary’ and they are entitled to have care.”

Dr Mark Porter, the chair of the British Medical Association, said the idea was a politically motivated response that would not solve the funding crisis in the NHS.



He told the Today programme: “There is a problem, the question is whether the proposal to require everybody using the NHS to show a passport and another form of identification before receiving hospital treatment is either proportionate or going to resolve the problem.



“The National Audit Office estimates that the uncollected fees are £200m a year. We have got an NHS with a deficit approaching 100 times that amount opening up over the course of this parliament. This is little other than a pinprick on top of the actual problems facing the NHS.

“Introducing something across the entire NHS in this way in response to such a small problem would be tremendously controversial.”

He added: “The background is an NHS that has been deliberately starved of the resources necessary to treat British people and recouping a small amount of those from overseas visitors by introduction of a new mechanism by which British people have to show their eligibility is simply not going to fill that gap.”