NHS staff should boycott Suella Braverman’s controversial plans to X-ray child migrants to check if they have lied about their age, a health chief has warned.
Ross McGhee, the president of the Society of Radiographers, said staff should refuse to carry out the tests, which can carry risks and should be used only when there is a medical need.
He said any move to implement scans for migrants would also pile additional pressure on a system already “at breaking point”, in a week where the prime minister made a personal pledge to reduce NHS waiting lists.
Figures show more than 184,000 patients in England are waiting three months or more for key tests, leading to warnings last month that diagnostic imaging services are being “brought close to failure”.
Ms Braverman has pledged that the “robust” new age checks will be introduced soon to settle disputes over the age of those arriving across the Channel on small boats. An expert panel is looking at options including X-rays, CT scans and MRI imaging.
The Home Office has never said how many people might be subject to the checks, but more than 45,000 people arrived in the UK by small boats last year alone, many of them young people.
Mr McGhee told The Independent he would advise his members, who he said were the only ones in the country who could carry out these tests, to boycott the idea.
Asked if he would advise his members not to carry out the X-rays, he said: “Yes. I would say to any member of the Society of Radiographers that if you are asked to X-ray anyone for any reason, other than a medical benefit, then it’s not justifiable.”
Ministers could not force staff to perform the tests, he added.
“We are autonomous medical professionals, registered with the state,” he said. “So we are there to make an autonomous decision on what we do. If we don’t believe it’s the right thing and justifiable under the law, then we are perfectly within our rights to say ‘I don’t think this is justifiable, and I’m not going to do it’.”
Although the risks are small, radiation can impact the body at a cellular level and too much poses a cancer risk, he said. The law requires radiographers to believe a test is justifiable medically, he added.
Mr McGhee warned that the system was already under pressure after long waiting lists built up during the Covid pandemic, without additional scans being added.
He said the system “is at breaking point”, adding: “We are not able to recruit enough people and retain enough people to be able to undertake the waiting lists that we’ve already got. So any additional pressure, no matter how small, especially with it being unjustifiable, is an additional pressure that we don’t need.”
Before Christmas the Home Office told The Independent that Ms Braverman’s pledge on age checks referred to proposals, floated by her predecessor Priti Patel, to use scientific methods to find adult migrants posing as children in a bid to stay in the UK.
Clare Moseley from charity Care4Calais said: “Age disputes present serious safeguarding issues. Erroneous or inaccurate age disputes result in children being placed in inappropriate accommodation with adults they do not know.
“From the children we have worked with, we know it causes them great anxiety and severely impacts on their mental health. The government should listen to radiographers and the other medical experts who have spoken out on this plan and ditch it now.”
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The wellbeing of children in our care is our absolute priority, which is why we are reforming age assessments through the Nationality and Borders Act to make them more consistent and robust by using scientific measures.
“Age assessments are challenging but vital to identifying genuine asylum-seeking children and stop abuse of the system.
“We are taking a holistic approach to prevent adults claiming to be children, or children being wrongly treated as adults – as both present serious safeguarding risks to children.”
