Revealed: The county where there are only two out-of-hours doctors for 600,000 people

Published 25th Jan 2010

Some 600,000 people in one of England's largest counties are left with only two doctors on call overnight and at weekends, it was revealed.

Medics say the service in Suffolk is threatening patient safety and points to the state of out-of-hours care across the health service.

In one case, a nine-month-old baby died of meningitis as his parents were told to wait up to four hours for a phone call from a GP.

The county's out-of-hours service, between 11.30pm and 8am is run by Take Care Now - the company that employed an exhausted German doctor who killed an elderly man on his first shift.

Three doctors are meant to be on call in Suffolk, but sometimes one is replaced by a nurse.

GPs in the county have written to their primary care trust to say patient safety is being threatened. Dr Claire Giles, chairwoman of Suffolk Local Medical Committee, said: 'The patches covered by these doctors have got bigger and bigger as the funding has been cut.'

TCN claims patients are happy with its service - but Suffolk Primary Care Trust says the company will be replaced in April.

Mark and Jennifer Smith, of Ipswich, lost nine-month-old Taylor to meningitis on March 15 last year. They had phoned NHS Direct at 2am after Taylor came out in a rash but by the time a doctor called at 5am, the boy had died of blood poisoning.

Mark Smith said: 'Our beautiful little boy had gone. It should not take four hours to get a call back from a doctor when you have a sick baby.'

Critics say NHS out-of-hours provision has been in crisis since the lucrative 2004 contract for GPs which allowed them to pull out of responsibility for patients in the evenings and weekends.

Some 90 per cent did so - leaving primary care trusts scrabbling to find alternative provision. Their failure means that more and more patients are being forced to call 999 or go to their A&E department because they cannot get a doctor.

A spokeswoman for the PCT said: 'We are continually monitoring patient safety and experience and will continue to do so.'

Poor care is now common across rural England. A report by the Primary Care Foundation found that just 20 per cent of primary care trusts are meeting the target of clinically assessing 90 per cent of urgent calls within 20 minutes - with the situation worse in rural areas.

An inquest has heard how David Gray, 70, from Manea, Cambridgeshire, died when he was injected with ten times the recommended amount of diamorphine by Dr Daniel Ubani. Dr Ubani had flown in from Germany to provide out-of-hours cover and spoke very poor English.

Source: ' Daily Mail '

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