HC Deb 09 February 1954 vol 523 cc986-7
25. Mr. Hubbard

asked the Secretary of State for Scotland if he is aware that, where medical practitioners work in partnership, patients may enter the name of one of the partners as their doctor for National Health Service purposes; that this partner may thus accumulate more names on his register than is provided for in the regulations, although the patients are aware that they may be attended to by another partner; and if he will take the necessary action to ensure that no physician in partnership with colleagues is refused payment in such circumstances.

Commander Galbraith

A doctor in a partnership has certain personal obligations to patients on his own list. By limiting the size of that list the regulations seek to prevent the acceptance of patients towards whom these obligations could not in practice be discharged. The present arrangements have been settled in agreement with the representatives of the profession, and I see no reason to alter them.

Mr. Hubbard

Is the right hon. and gallant Gentleman aware that one of the evil effects of this arrangement is that doctors who may wish to take assistants into partnership hold back, because, under the existing arrangements, they would have to canvass their patients in order to have them transferred to the name of the new partner? Many men who might well have become partners are consequently still assistants.

Commander Galbraith

The arrangements allow a doctor to have 4,500 patients on his list so long as the average throughout the practice is 3,500. I do not see how a doctor can reasonably be expected to look after more than 4,500 patients.

Mr. Hubbard

That is not the point of the Question. Where a doctor has an assistant the number of patients is divided equally between the doctor and his assistant, but when he promotes the assistant to be a partner there is a new arrangement and, unlessthe patients nominate the partner, the doctor does not find the patients equally allocated between himself and the assistant. For that reason we require an alteration in the regulations, so that some encouragement is given to doctors to promote their assistants to be partners.