NHS pension system declared a retired worker dead and stopped paying her; she borrowed money to fly to Britain to prove she was alive

A retired NHS worker living in Cape Town found herself in an extraordinary financial crisis after the organisation responsible for her pension payments mistakenly recorded her as dead.

Her pension stopped arriving in May 2026, leaving her struggling to pay everyday bills and forcing her to borrow money simply to travel to Britain and try to prove that she was still alive.

The woman, who worked for the NHS for 11 years before retiring to South Africa in 2015, said repeated phone calls and emails failed to resolve the problem.

Her situation became even more difficult because she was already dealing with financial hardship after a similar pension problem the previous year.NHS pension payments stopped after she was wrongly recorded as deadThe pensioner first discovered something was wrong when her NHS pension stopped arriving in May.

When she contacted the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA), which administers the NHS pension scheme, she was reportedly told that its records showed she was deceased.