Immigration and the NHS

Fact checks related to the impact a changing population has on the NHS

30 May 2023

The Lancet did not report 6.5 million migrants registered at GPs in the last decade

A Facebook post appears to have repeated an old claim that the Lancet medical journal said 6.5 million migrants had registered with GPs in the last 10 years.

Read more…
20 November 2019

Lib Dem claims about EU health workers and the NHS are generally true

It is true that tens of thousands of NHS staff are from other EU countries, and that other EU nursing numbers have noticeably dropped.

Read more…
21 November 2018

EU staff in the NHS: what has happened since the referendum?

EU nationals make up a similar percentage of the NHS workforce in England now as they did in 2016.

Read more…
6 September 2018

How much does the UK recover in health costs from the EU?

A post circulating on Facebook makes claims about how much the UK pays out to other EU countries for health costs incurred by UK citizens abroad.

Read more…
19 January 2018

Where have all the (EU) nurses gone?

In the year to September 2017 the number of nurses from the EU leaving the NHS in England outweighed those joining it for the first time in at least five years.

Read more…
22 September 2017

NHS staff from the EU: one year on from the referendum

9,800 staff reporting they were from the EU left NHS England between June 2016 and June 2017.

Read more…
6 February 2017

How much can we charge people from overseas to use the NHS?

The government has an “ambition” to recover £500 million a year by 2017/18 from overseas patients not eligible for free NHS treatment.

Read more…
3 February 2017

Health tourism savings won't plug the hole in NHS funding

Estimates show health tourism costs up to £300 million a year, but savings from this alone won't fill the gap in funding for the NHS.

Read more…
21 December 2016

Health tourism: what's the cost?

The government has previously estimated that "health tourism" costs the NHS around 0.3% of NHS spending allocated to specific services.

Read more…
23 June 2015

Foreign nurses: how many are to be "kicked out" due to visa rules?

The Independent and the Mirror have reported very different figures on the number of nurses who'll be affected by recent visa changes.

Read more…

Full Fact fights bad information

Bad information ruins lives. It promotes hate, damages people’s health, and hurts democracy. You deserve better.