What happens if you have a medical emergency after deplaning but before passing passport control?

Question

Let's say you are a visa national flying into a UK airport with a valid entry clearance. Between exiting the airplane and passing through passport control you have a medical emergency that requires you to be urgently transported to a hospital. What would then happen with your immigration status? Possible options I see:

1. The immigration officers will search your luggage, find your passport and stamp it - could be tricky if you have your passport on you in the ambulance.

2. They ask you to report back to the airport once you're healthy for processing.

3. They send a policeman to watch your hospital ward 24/7 until you are able to go back to the airport.

4. They give you some sort of emergency entry clearance and you don't have to deal with it in any way.

Answer 1

I worked in the A&E at Ashford hospital in Middlesex about 20 years ago. Ashford is a couple of miles from Heathrow, and all people requiring hospital assessment from Terminal 4 were brought to us.

I can recall only a couple of times where people were brought from arriving flights not having gone through immigration, but on both occasions they were accompanied by a police officer. They were admitted to the hospital, so I don't know what happened after they left the Emergency department, except the police officer went off to the ward with them.

Answer 2

This is about the US rather than the UK, but here is a relevant article about the treatment at Stanford Hospital of passengers traveling on Asiana Airlines flight 214, which crashed just before the runway at the San Francisco airport.

From the article:

And when they were healthy enough to leave the hospital, they couldn't simply be discharged because they had not yet cleared U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"They came straight from the runway," Weiss said. "They weren't officially in the United States yet." Adding to the complication was the fact that seven were minors unaccompanied by parents.

Sitting in open patient rooms and lounges, social workers, translators, Red Cross and customs officers, as well as a representative from Asiana Airlines, worked past midnight clearing patients for release.