A London hospital is prioritising non-English speaking patients for treatment, pushing native or fluent speakers to the back of the queue, a report has found.
According to To Sunday MailImperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, which runs five hospitals in northwest London, has launched an initiative to prioritise patients who need interpreters.
The policy is supposed to cut costs by reducing interpreters' working hours, but its effect is to deliberately exclude English-speaking interpreters.
The policy will reportedly also apply to clinics that have implemented a ticket system to determine the order in which patients are seen.
A patient Morse“Because it's a clinic, I was prepared to wait for a while, but the person behind me in line got examined first, so when I asked the receptionist why, they told me that people with interpreters could not wait for more than an hour, so they were given priority.”
London, now a minority English city, has the highest proportion of immigrants of any part of the UK, with more than 40% of its residents being foreign nationals.
It is not immediately clear whether Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust's policy has been adopted by hospitals in other parts of the country.
But the decision to prioritise non-English speakers for parts of the national health system was criticised by former immigration minister and Conservative leadership candidate Robert Jenrick.
“British people are already waiting too long for treatment and the last humiliation they should suffer is to be pushed to the back of the queue,” Mr Jenrick said.
“This is further evidence of the pressure mass immigration puts on our public services and the difficulty of integrating such unprecedented numbers of people… People who don't speak English should not be given a pass to jump the queue.”
Responding to the report, a spokesman for Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust said: “We are committed to meeting the specific needs of our patients and every patient has the right to have a professional interpreter.”
