Young people or people with kids...do you think this could never possibly happen here?
"Hospitals in London are prioritising patients who don’t speak English for care while sending native or fluent speakers to the back of the queue, a report has found.
According to the Mail on Sunday, the Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, which has five hospitals in north-west London under its remit, has begun to push patients who require a language translator to the front of the line.The policy is supposedly intended to cut costs for interpreters by reducing the number of hours worked. However, this results in English speakers being deliberately passed over.
The policy even reportedly applies in clinics that have a ticketing system for determining the order of patients seen.One patient told the MoS: “It’s a clinic, so you go in expecting to wait a while, but when someone behind me in the queue was let into see the doctor before me I asked the receptionist why and was told that the people with interpreters are prioritised because they can’t wait for more than an hour.”
London, which has become a minority English city, has the largest proportion of migrants of any region of the UK, with more than 40 per cent of its residents being foreigners."
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