Overseas Visitor Charging Category
Summary
- All NHS trusts providing secondary care
- Primary care providers
- Non-NHS providers of NHS care
- Demographics
- Financial management
- Information codes of practice
- Reference data
- Community health
- Dentistry
- GP / Primary care
- Hospital
- Maternity
- Mental health
- Urgent and Emergency Care
Documentation
This information standard sets out the values which must be used in the recording of relevant information by providers of NHS-funded services in scope of the National Health Service (Charges to Overseas Visitors) Regulations 2015, most recently amended by the National Health Service (Charges to Overseas Visitors) (Amendment) Regulations 2017. These Regulations mandate the identification, charging and recovery of costs from patients who are not entitled to use the NHS for free.
The Regulations require NHS trusts and foundation trusts to record on a patient’s NHS Record when they are an overseas visitor, whether an exemption from charge category applies to that overseas visitor and on what date that assessment of their status in this regard took place. The NHS Record refers to patient records held in patient administration systems and the Summary Care Record application.
In support of this requirement, this new information standard states that the attribute, OVERSEAS VISITOR CHARGING CATEGORY, must be used to record the chargeable status of a patient using NHS services where this information is recorded.
Note that this information standard will consolidate and update the two current methods of recording chargeable status:
- Commissioning Data Sets (CDS): the attribute used is Overseas Visitor Status Classification (OVSC)
- Emergency Care Data Set (ECDS): while the attribute used is Overseas Visitor Charging Category (OVCC), the values do not differentiate between Decision Pending and Not Known.
Both CDS and ECDS will be updated on their next releases to reflect the new values.
This standard may be used for local purposes with immediate effect.
Conformance dates
Full conformance will have two separate dates:
- The update to ECDS is anticipated September 2019
- The update to CDS is anticipated April 2020.
Users of these data sets will be notified of their actual implementation dates by future Information Standards Notices. Changes to other national Information Standards, Collections and Extractions will be implemented in agreement with their developers.