Ghost patients

SIR – You report (August 27) that GPS are being paid millions for “ghost patients”.

There are many reasons for such patients. For instance, women marry, move to a different doctor and register under their new surname, and the records are not correlated. If you misspell your name, the same thing can happen. People die away from home and the doctor is not notified. The Department of Health is well aware of this problem, and payments to doctors have always been adjusted to take care of this.

The only alternative would be to have a national identity card system, with everyone receiving a unique number, but this is considered politically unacceptable.

On the other hand, my very fit father, when visiting our family doctor for the first time, found that he had never registered with him, meaning that our doctor had lost 20 years of payments.

Dr William Ward Colchester, Essex