Wednesday 21st June @ 7:00 pm – 8:30 pm
Come and learn about our national movement and about the local campaign at the Royal Free Hospital and find out how you can help to end the charging of vulnerable patients for NHS care. There will be a short introduction talk, followed by a screening of the 25 minute documentary, and then a Panel discussion and Q+A afterwards with some snacks and drinks available.
Refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented migrants and are being harmed by the hostile environment policy and hundreds of vulnerable patients are being charged for NHS care at the Royal Free Hospital every year. Some of these patients are destitute, and others are reported to the Home Office which can jeopardise their asylum claim. The hostile environment policies lead to delays, deterrence, damage and tragic deaths for these patients. These policies worsen disparities in terms of health inequality and cause moral injury to healthcare workers.
Not only are these policies unethical and denounced and opposed by the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, the British Medical Association, the Royal College of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, and the Royal College of General Practitioners but they are also they are also a big step away from achieving the World Health Organisations target for universal healthcare. Furthermore, it has been proven in various studies that charging migrants for healthcare is not a cost effective way to save money, as it often costs more money to track down patients than is ever recouped, and leads to patients requiring emergency care in the long term which is more expensive and not recoverable. Good access to preventative medicine is much more cost effective and ethical. Healthcare workers refuse to act a border-guards.
The Royal Free hospital was set up, in 1828 to “provide free care to those of little means” and when the NHS was set up by Aneurin Bevan over 100 years later, the founding doctrine was that “illness is neither an indulgence for which people have to pay, nor an offence for which they should be penalised, but a misfortune the cost of which should be shared by the community.”