I remember hearing of schools in Liverpool that tried to claim for pupils that did not exist, I did not expect to find doctors in the UK trying the same trick.
An article in the papers today says that there are 55 million patients registered by doctors in the UK. With an actual population of 52.5 million, that means there are potentially 2.5 million ghost patients in the system. These are people who have moved house, left the country or are dead – in some cases for up to 40 years.
I thought it was only the Greeks that claimed pensions for dead people, now it seems that doctor’s surgeries in Britain do the same. At £65 per patient, the potential wastage is £162 million a year.
In many cases it will just be a matter of neglect or the patients haven’t bothered to de register themselves. How are the surgery to know that a person has died or has moved house unless someone tells them? Still, at £65 per patient per year, there is not a lot of incentive for the doctors to chase these matters up.
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