Over 300,000 patients have been stripped away from GP practices across England in the last year as part of what the BMA describes as NHS England’s ‘aggressive national patient list cleansing exercise’.
The BMA announced the scandalous practice in a press release issued yesterday on the eve of its Annual Representative Meeting (ARM) which opens in at the Brighton Centre in Sussex today and runs until Wednesday.
The BMA believes the action is leaving patients without a GP and placing an even greater financial burden on practices.
‘List cleansing’ is a routine data audit intended to find ‘ghost patients’; for example, those who may have died, or have moved away. Letters are sent to suspected ‘ghost patients’ asking them to confirm they still wish to be a registered patient.
The BMA’s GP committee for England is alarmed at the speed at which this list cleansing is happening and is challenging the veracity of the process being used by Primary Care Support England – the support body for GP practices, dentists and optometrists.
This accelerated speed is causing real patients to be mistakenly removed from their GP’s list, which is a threat to their safety.
Many practices have already told the BMA that once they challenged these errors, the patients had to be added back onto their lists.
This raises questions about the effectiveness of this audit process and why those patients were removed in the first place.
Additionally, suddenly losing patients means practices are facing unpredictable drops in funding.
The BMA’s GP committee deputy chair Dr David Wrigley said: ‘This aggressive “list cleansing’’ exercise has reduced GP practice patient lists by over 300,000 over the past 12 months, equating to practices losing just under £40 million in funding for essential GP medical services. This comes at a time when practices in England are already severely underfunded.
‘A programme of this scale affects both patients and practices. While accurate patient lists are essential for planning and fair allocation of NHS resources, the pace and intensity of this exercise mean we cannot be sure that mistakes are not being made and patients being wrongly taken off their GP list.
‘Patients may be wrongly removed from their local practice if they do not reply to letters within the required timeframe.
‘This risk is greatest for vulnerable patient groups, including older people, those with learning disabilities, those living in houses of multiple occupancy and individuals whose first language is not English.’
BMA is balloting its resident doctors this week on the latest pay and employment offer from the government – the result to be announce next week.
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