Call for GPs to charge for ‘extra services’
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- Published: Tuesday, 09 May 2017 07:40
- Written by News Editor
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GPs are demanding to be allowed to charge patients for extra services to ease an NHS cash crisis and evade rationing. Nine local medical committees have said that it would be more convenient for patients if doctors offered some vaccines and minor surgery not available on the NHS. They say it will be more convenient for patients and cut down on bureaucracy.
The nine local medical committees representing GPs from Northumberland to Cornwall have asked the British Medical Association to support a change in the rules, saying they are hopelessly out of date and constitute restraint of trade. Some say the change could allow general practice to develop as a “truly commercial entity”.
Ben Molyneux, vice-chairman of the City and Hackney local medical committee in London, who will present the proposal at a conference in Edinburgh this month, said it was about “allowing patients to get the non-NHS services they want to receive from the GP they know, at a surgery near to their home”.
Prit Buttar, a GP in Oxfordshire, said allowing more private work would attract new doctors and raise money, but conceded: “It may well be more contentious when you have something like evening opening, [if] a practice could earn more opening privately in the evening than it could from the NHS.”
If the plan is backed, it will become a policy of the BMA’s GP committee, which negotiates contracts. The Department of Health and NHS England have rejected similar requests in the past.
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