‘Ghost patients’ boost GP coffers by £955 million after figures rise by two thirds in the past five years

GP practices are paid millions of pounds a year for patients who don't exist, figures show.

The number of 'ghost patients' who remain on GPs' books – despite death or relocation – has risen by almost two-thirds in the past five years.

According to data from NHS Digital, there were 62.9 million people registered with a GP in England as of November 1 last year, although Office for National Statistics figures put the population at just 57.1 million – a difference of 5.8 million .

Yesterday the TaxPayers' Alliance said the public should not subsidize GPs in this way. Researcher Tom Ryan said: 'Unless these missing patients can be found, GP practice funding will need to be adjusted accordingly.'

GPs are paid for patients on their list and will receive an average of £164.64 per registered patient in 2022-2023. So practices at that time could have received £955 million for patients who might not have existed.

The number of 'ghost patients' is now 61 percent higher than five years ago, when the number was an estimated 3.6 million, despite promises of a crackdown.

In 2019, the NHS Counter Fraud Authority began formally investigating whether GPs were making claims for non-existent patients, but this work was halted during Covid.

Unions including the British Medical Association tried to block the move, claiming it was 'a bureaucratic burden' on overburdened doctors. And the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) denied practices were deliberately making profits by keeping non-existent patients on their lists.

RCGP vice-president Dr Victoria Tzortziou Brown said: 'GP practices do their best to keep their patient lists as up to date as possible, but this is dependent on timely and accurate information about patient movement so that individuals are not inappropriately a general practitioner will be removed. list.'

Blaming rising workloads, she said more than 32 million appointments were made in September, almost five million more than the same month in 2019, but with 827 fewer fully qualified, full-time GPs than at the end of 2019.

She added: 'Recent developments that enable timely electronic transfer of patient records between practices when a patient moves can help.'

A spokeswoman for the NHS Counter Fraud Authority said the 2019 investigation was 'effectively halted due to difficulties in obtaining core data, and our priorities have shifted from this position with the NHS response to Covid-19. We have not yet revisited the issue as we focus our resources where the intelligence community indicates the most appropriate priorities lie.”