What a surprise! A&E cases fall when GPs open 7 days a week

OPENING GP surgeries at weekends would mean two million fewer patients waiting in A&E every year.

Research shows the number of visits to casualty has dropped by 8 per cent in areas where patients can see family doctors seven days a week.

Academics say there is a huge decrease in the numbers going to emergency departments with mild or moderate ailments such as colds, sprains and back ache.

They also believe the NHS should pay GPs more to open routinely at weekends – possibly by using cash saved from the reduction in visits to A&E.

Over the past decade the numbers of patients arriving in casualty has soared by 50 per cent with 21.7million in 2013/14.

The rise has partly been blamed on a contract introduced by Labour in 2004 which enabled GPs to opt out of working eve- nings and weekends. These services are now subcontracted to private firms which patients either do not trust or do not know how to get hold of, instead going to A&E.

Professor Peter Dolton, an economics expert at Sussex University, looked at the A&E attendances at Central London Clinical Commissioning Group, an NHS body covering 34 GP practices.

Four of the surgeries offer weekend appointments to all patients as part of a Government pilot project launched in 2013.

The research found that, on average, the number of patients arriving at A&E dropped by 8 per cent – up to a 10 per cent reduction at weekends.

If this were true for all surgeries across England, then an estimated 1.736million fewer patients would have gone to cas- ualty last year. The scheme – called the Prime Minister’s Challenge Fund – involves 1,147 English GP surgeries which were each given a slice of £50million to ensure several practices in the area stay open seven days a week.

Draft research by NHS England last month found that, since the scheme was established in Birmingham, the number of A&E patients had dropped by as much as 25 per cent at one practice.

They fell by more than 10 per cent in Arden, Herefordshire and Worcestershire and by 10 per cent in North West London.

Professor Dolton, speaking at the Royal Society of Economics conference in Manchester, said: ‘It’s having a significant effect on A&E and it’s very important.’ He said the Government should consider giving GPs extra funding to open their surgeries at weekends permanently. The money provided under current scheme is only a one-off.

One way of doing this, he said, would be to use money saved from the reduction in A&E visits which are very costly to the NHS. The average cost of an A&E visit is £ 114 compared to a GP appointment which is just £25.

But Dr Maureen Baker, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: ‘For the vast majority, seven-day opening remains an aspiration and telling patients that they can walk into their local surgery in the evenings or at weekends risks raising expectations that general practice cannot live up to with current resources.

‘Investing in longer opening hours may not be the best route to improving care in every area.’

‘A significant effect’