GP ‘bribes’ to slash drugs for elderly

FAMILY doctors are being offered ‘bribes’ to slash the number of drugs given to the elderly in a controversial scheme to save NHS cash.

The cash incentives come in exchange for reducing prescriptions for frail patients over 70 or those living in care homes.

The scheme is being run by Oxfordshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) health trust and aims to save at least £1.45million over the next year.

Doctors have been instructed to carry out a review of patients over 70 who are particularly frail or have several different long term conditions. They have also been urged to ‘audit’ at least 10 per cent of all care home residents, the magazine Pulse revealed. If they successfully reduce the number of ‘inappropriate’ prescriptions for both groups, their surgeries will receive half the money saved.

Managers of the Oxfordshire CCG, which covers 221,000 patients, argue many elderly patients are on a cocktail of needless and expensive drugs, which are potentially harmful taken together.

But Professor Helen Stokes-Lampard, chairman an of the Royal College of GPs, said: ‘Any decision to alter a prescription, whether that be to reduce or increase it, should be made in the best interests of patients’ health and wellbeing and not principally seen as a way of saving money.’ She added that the scheme ‘will risk jeopardising the trust between doctors and their patients’.

Joyce Robins, co-director of the pressure group Patient Concern, told The Times: ‘It feels a bit like a bribe. Telling GPs you can be better off financially by prescribing less to patients doesn’t seem like a good idea.’

A spokesman for Oxfordshire CCG said the scheme aimed to ‘optimise medication’.