HOSPITAL accountants are probing the cost to A&E of Swindon’s GP shortages and the struggles some patients have faced in getting appointments.

It follows changes to appointment booking systems at five GP practices brought in by firm Integral Medical Holdings in the autumn.

Many patients say they have struggled to get through to the new central call centre and last month Swindon NHS Clinical Commissioning Group admitted more people had visited A&E as a result of the delays.

Great Western Hospital’s finance director Karen Johnson said the NHS hospital trust was looking at the impact of recent changes in how GP care is structured in Swindon.

Mrs Johnson told GWH’s board of directors: “The GPs in Swindon have changed configuration and we just want to make sure that change hasn’t had an adverse impact in terms of the patients coming in. We are doing some work on patient flow in terms of where they are coming in from.”

The work was yet to be finished, she added.

Swindon already faces a shortage of at least 25 GPs. The latest figures published late last week show that more than 9,500 patients were left waiting more than four weeks for their GP appointment in October, the equivalent of eight percent of all bookings. A third of patients were seen on the same day as their appointment.

Mrs Johnson told GWH directors she had been in talks with Swindon CCG, which commissions NHS care, about the impact GP shortages was suspected as having on the hospital’s emergency ward.

GWH’s chairman, Roger Hill, said: “If we’re getting £1 from planned care and 70p from outpatients or emergency care, there is a 30p gap in terms of the activity we’re undertaking per pounds-worth of income. That could add up to a great deal of money over the course of a year.”