The Government has today revealed the top-ten most common nationalities of foreign-born women who gave birth in NHS hospitals in the last year.
The new record level of births to foreign-born mothers is more than double the proportion of 20 years ago, with women originally from Poland topping the list, according to the Office for National Statistics.
A total of 184,000 children were born in these circumstances, with almost half of them in London, which has a foreign-born mother rate of 56.7 per cent, far above the national average of 25.5 per cent.
According to official figures, the average hospital birth can cost £1,600, meaning the total cost to the NHS of these would have been at least £30million.
Some of the women will have been born abroad and settled in the UK but a number will have visited just to use the NHS.
So called ‘health tourism’ as a whole is thought to cost taxpayers as much as £200million a year.
Urgent treatment, such as maternity care, is provided regardless of residence status or ability to pay but hospitals must take reasonable measures to recover debts from overseas patients if they can trace them.
Some trusts are owed tens of millions by foreign patients and have been forced to write-off some of these debts.
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