I NOTICE patients are having trouble getting an appointment with their GP due to the newly introduced Government targets.

These days if you experience this kind of trouble you are one of the lucky ones. My local Primary Care Trust has a solution for this particular problem. It permits surgeries to strike patients from its registers if they no longer fall within the surgeries catchment criteria.

The surgery itself may have contributed to its change in catchment area by relocating to better premises in a different area. I have seen first hand where this method has been ruthlessly applied to simply to achieve Government access targets and know personally of patients that have belonged to practices for twenty, thirty and fifty years being struck off even though they were actively undergoing treatment. They had no say in the merciless removal from their GP's register.

By employing such tactics, access targets can be achieved for those remaining patients but at the expense of those who are kicked out.

H ZUKOWSKI

Swindon