Out-of-hours GP service 'good news for doctors and no one else'

Out-of-hours GP services provided to nine million patients a year in Britain are difficult to access, slow to respond and their overall performance is "not good enough," MPs on the Public Accounts Committee say.

Preparations for the new service, introduced from April 2004, were "shambolic" and "thoroughly mishandled" by the Department of Health, the MPs say. The Department of Health responded to the criticism by announcing random spot checks on the services to tackle "inconsistencies" in their quality in different parts of the country.

The Public Accounts Committee says the only people to benefit from the new service, which allowed GPs to shed their 24-hour responsibility in return for giving up £6,000 in pay, were the doctors themselves. The amount they gave up was not enough to fund the new service, run by primary care trusts using a mix of private companies and GP co-operatives, which cost £70m a year more than had been foreseen.

Edward Leigh, its chairman, said: "[This] was good news for the doctors but no one else. They were given a strong incentive to opt out (a lot less work for a small loss of income) and a disproportionate amount of taxpayers' income is now having to be spent to provide a replacement out-of-hours service."

The Royal College of General Practitionersadmitted that services had become "confusing, fragmented, and of highly variable". The BMA said many out-of-hours services "left a lot to be desired".