Doctors’ union blocks blitz on ‘ghost patients’ that cost £850m a year

doCTorS are resisting an NHS call to cut non-existent ‘ghost’ patients from their surgery lists despite them costing a notional £850million a year.

The number of patients registered to GP services in England was 61.8million as of August 1, according to NHS digital – 5.3million more than the country’s population.

It works out as £159.61 per patient for the year 2020-21 when the total funding is split by the number of registered patients – meaning up to £845,933,000 could notionally be given to GPs for patients who may have died, moved abroad or are duplicates.

NHS England has ordered Capita, which runs Primary

Care Support England

( PCSE), to restart data checks on patient lists after it was paused in January to free up capacity. In an email sent by PCSE, GPs were told the checks ‘are carried out to reduce the number of patients incorrectly registered’.

But doctors union the British medical Association branded the checks ‘a bureaucratic burden’ and asked for the process to be ‘delayed’ – a request already declined by NHS England.

dennis reed, from pensioners’ campaign group Silver Voices, called the situation a ‘scandal’. He said: ‘If certain practices are actually intentionally keeping people they know are dead, then I think that would be fraud.’

The NHS Counter Fraud Authority said there was a ‘potential for manipulation’, but did not suggest there was any evidence of it.

Professor martin marshall, chairman of the royal College of GPs, said: ‘So-called ‘ghost patients’ are the result of a records management issue, not a case of surgeries deliberately profiting by keeping patients on their lists when they shouldn’t be there.

‘We should be supporting GPs by addressing the intense pressures in general practice and investing in IT and booking systems – not wrongfully accusing them of defrauding the health service.’

dr Kieran Sharrock, deputy chairman of the BmA’s general practitioners committee, said: ‘This is not the time to be reintroducing a bureaucratic process which does not add anything to patient care.’

‘Potential for manipulation’