Fascinating to read Government plans to charge patients from outside Europe
150 per cent of their treatment cost under the NHS. Health Secretary Jeremy
Hunt believes the plans could save the health service £500m a year and the
Government also wants to charge EU patients 125 per cent of the normal cost of treatment. Additionally, those hospitals that fail to bill foreign patients could also apparently face fines.
It isn’t clear if such a measure will be applied to dental treatment charges, especially as, to my knowledge, this element hasn’t been built in the pilot schemes to date but the prospect of the administration alone is a nightmare. In a recent visit to an admittedly major dental, medical and biomedical sciences institute I was told that in order to effectively service overseas students’ applications and enrolment no fewer than four full time staff were employed to manage and administer the visa applications and processes. Look out for adverts not only for practice managers but also for non-domiciled patient, fee-administration operatives.
Too young to eat sugar
If the number of column inches and online electrons are anything to go by, the continuing debate about the possibility of introducing a tax on sugar is hotting up. How likely it is to come into being is quite another matter as the
complexities of applying it seem to be monstrous.
However, the BMA did suggest an interesting initiative at their recent conference when delegates voted overwhelmingly for a motion that anyone born after the year 2000 should be banned from buying cigarettes. Seen as an attempt to ‘break the cycle of children starting to smoke’ the idea could equally well be applied to purchasing confectionery and fizzy drinks. Of course the downside would be huge opportunities for black market supplies and one could foresee sucrose dealers and a police unit devoted to illegal consumption of non-milk extrinsic sugars. The Department of Health said that it was interested in the idea, but there are no immediate plans for new laws. Surprise.
A good foundation?
Staying with the BMA annual conference, it heard about plans to allow medical graduates to register with the GMC directly after graduation. Currently graduates must undertake a year’s supervised foundation training (as in dentistry) before they can be licensed by, in their case, the GMC to practise independently. However under plans from Health Education England the GMC would register graduates as they leave university after five or six years, freeing them to treat patients without further supervision.
The plans were put forward to solve a crisis in the training of doctors where
there is an oversupply of medical students graduating and a shortage of
foundation year training places. This is rather different from the Department of Health’s stance on foundation dentists in which they are imposing a pay cut and claiming to use the money saved to provide additional training places. In many ways it is remarkable that anyone wants to study medicine or dentistry anymore.