'Risk-averse' NHS 24 costs £36 per call claims GP

THE NHS 24 out-of-hours phone service costs more than £36 for each call it receives, a conference heard yesterday.

Dr John Ip, a GP in Paisley, told the British Medical Association event that the 64 million budget for the service could not be justified when most of the calls it handled were simply referred to other providers, such as GPs, to deal with.

He also said many of the cases referred to doctors were inappropriate and not a good use of resources because NHS 24 was too "risk averse".

Dr Ip said: "GPs doing out-of-hours sessions tell us NHS 24 is telling patients to attend centres for minor ailments which could easily be dealt with in hours by their own GP".

Stories included a 25-year-old woman with a sore toe who at 4am was referred to a GP in an out-of-hours centre. Transport had to be sent to pick her up to take her there, when her own GP would be open a few hours later.

Dr George Crooks, NHS 24 clinical director, said the cost per call highlighted by the doctor was a crude calculation which did not take into account the other services they ran. "They are taking the total budget of NHS 24 and dividing it by the 1.5 million or so patients who call the core service," he said.

"But NHS 24 now runs 12 clinical services."