'67,000 stateless children can't access healthcare'

The head of the Karen Studies and Development Centre, Surapong Kongchantuk, said 67,511 students across the country had no access to state-supported medical services because they were stateless.
“Many of them have insisted they are Thais and entered the nationality verification process to prove that. However, the process has been delayed because there are changes of the Public Health Ministry’s executives,” Surapong said.
The Interior Ministry is recounting the number of stateless students – a process that would take at least half a year, it was revealed.
Surapong spoke at a seminar at the Bangkok-based Student Christian Centre on Thursday.
Speaking at the same event, Carole, a 15-year-old stateless student, said: “I have never been to the hospital even when I fell ill. I was told that it is quite expensive and it could cause me trouble, because I don’t have an identification card.
“Therefore, my parents buy me medicine instead of running through the complexity of the hospital system and the risk of getting caught by the police.”
Carole attends the Takolang School in Suan Phung district in Kanchanaburi.
Like the thousands of other stateless students across the country, she cannot become a Thai citizen due to a lack of documents.

Figure based on surveys
The 67,511 figure was determined based on surveys conducted at primary and secondary schools by the Education Ministry.
Chaleaw Tuanpao, the director of the Takolang School, said there were almost 700 students in the school and 144 were stateless.
He said if stateless students went to hospital it would cost between Bt100 and Bt1,000, plus the cost for transport, and that was quite expensive given their families’ meagre incomes.
“There was a student who got sick one weekend and he had to wait until Monday for a teacher to bring him to hospital, because our school has it own budget to take care of the students,” he added.
He said because most people in the district were stateless, they did not have adequate healthcare despite the high incidence of dengue hemorrhagic fever there.
He believed health problems affected students’ academic performance.
“This is worrying,” he said.