Letter:Found: men who do visit their GP
Sir: General practice remuneration is a bizarre system, and in fact if 60 per cent of men are unregistered and register this year the effect will not be to give us increased income with which to treat the increased numbers (Letters, 14 and 17 June). What would actually happen would be that the Government would note the following year that the health service had paid more to GPs than it had planned, and reduce fees to reclaim the money in the following year.
However, the balance of male and female patients in my practice, and in those others I know of, is sufficiently close to 50:50 that the idea of a large unregistered and unregarded pool of men seems highly unlikely. Most of them rely on their wives or mothers to remember the name of their doctor for them, and indeed have commonly been registered along with the rest of the family
Dr A K MIDGLEY
Exeter
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