05.09.16
Trusts told to ‘ensure sufficient focus’ on cost recovery from overseas visitors
The NHS will recover £500m a year by 2017-18 from overseas visitors who use its services, NHS Improvement (NHSI) and the Department of Health have promised, advising trusts to “ensure sufficient focus” is placed on cost recovery.
In a joint letter to NHS trusts, Sir Keith Pearson, independent advisor to the visitor and migrant NHS Cost Recovery Programme, and Robert Alexander, executive director of resources and deputy CEO at NHSI, laid out a number of measures designed to support the programme.
An enhancement to the Summary Care Record application has been made which will mean that a banner will be displayed on patients’ NHS Spine records indicating whether their chargeable status has been established.
Patients who are chargeable will have that indicated if they have paid the immigration health surcharge or an Overseas Visitor Manager (OVM) has investigated their chargeable status and updated their notes.
The enhancement is intended to make it easier for OVMs to identify chargeable patients and for additional data to be captured while making it harder for chargeable patients to move on from one trust to the next.
NHSI and the Department of Health urged trust leaders to make staff aware of the changes and “ensure sufficient focus is placed on cost recovery from overseas visitors within their organisations”. This particularly applies to trusts in high migrations or tourism areas and near universities with high numbers of overseas students.
The two organisations also said they have launched new e-learning modules about the changing rules, aimed at finance leaders, and re-launched the Cost Recovery Support Team (CRST), which will soon be available to trusts to help them enhance their cost recovery processes.
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