Once the fog of the festive season has lifted, many of us will be feverishly checking holiday brochures to find a perfect week away in August that will make the rest of the winter bearable.
But latest proposals from the European Union mean that the brochures could soon be recommending hospitals near to your holiday hotel, alongside the best beaches and bars.
According to a story in The Times, the EU wants to open up a European market in healthcare that will allow citizens to travel across borders if they are suffering delays in treatment. In most cases the healthcare will have to be funded by the home country.
Not surprisingly, the UK government will be fighting the proposals to prevent NHS funds leaving the country (for some reason they don’t expect much traffic in the opposite direction).
When this issue first blew up several years ago, the big concerns in primary care were that practices would be left dealing with post-operative care and the medico-legal nightmare of botched operations abroad.
Nowadays the biggest headache could be offering the patient a choice of providers and arranging their surgery via a Europe-wide version of Choose and Book. Scarey…