Good morning readers — welcome to Thursday’s Dispatch.
In today’s edition, we attempt to explain a story that was recently covered everywhere from The Sun to The Guardian and several local newspapers here in the West Midlands. "Ghost patients” were all the rage and there has been a big uptick in numbers of them in the last five years. But I found the coverage frustrating — it was all the same! The same spokespeople quoted and research cited, but without joining the dots to suggest why the surge in ghost patients has occurred.
I wanted to do a bit of reading and speak to a couple of informed people to find out more — I think good journalism doesn’t oversimplify complex issues but helps readers to understand them. With that aim, The Dispatch is going to start a little series: Dispatch Explainers. This is the first one; let us know in the comments what subject we should choose for next month.
Also, this is very exciting: it was recently brought to my attention that last month the Financial Times recommended our Gurpaal Judge investigation to its readers! I missed this at the time but was happy to learn that our reporting has already been recognised by the national press. If you are a new Dispatch member and haven’t read the story, you can find it here, and the follow up is here. Plus:
- If you have any more information about Lotus Sanctuary that we haven’t published yet, please tell me more in an email.
- We are also looking into an organisation called Enterprise Homes Group which used to be based in Wolverhampton. If you have had any involvement with them and have information to share please get in touch.
Finally, I’m thrilled to say we have rocketed past our target to get 250 paid members by the end of the week! We had 246 when I wrote yesterday’s Brum in Brief and that number has soared to 260. A very warm welcome to all of our new members. Our aim is to make it to 300 by the end of January, so if you haven’t signed up yet and want to be a part of our mission to bring Birmingham quality reporting, hit that button below.
Brum in Brief
⚖️ Six new inquests have been opened into the deaths of former patients of disgraced surgeon Ian Paterson. Paterson is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for carrying out unnecessary and unapproved procedures on more than 1,000 patients over 14 years. He worked in Birmingham between 1997 and 2011.
🎭 The Royal Shakespeare Company has introduced £25 tickets to make the Stratford-Upon-Avon theatre more accessible. “The RSC’s first joint artistic directors in four decades, Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, announced an inaugural season packed with politically tinged plays as they try to reinvigorate the former home of the bard.”
📖 Voce Books in Digbeth has been voted one of the UK’s best independent bookshops in The Times. Garrie Fletcher, who nominated Voce, said: “Owned and run by Clive and Maria Judd, Voce is incredibly supportive of independent publishers and proud to be based in the heart of the country in Birmingham.”
🍸 Black led organisation Melanin Moods is bringing back its Convos and Cocktails night with a DJ, two-for-one drinks, and panel discussions about mental health for black and brown communities in Birmingham. Tickets for tomorrow night are almost gone but there are a few left, from £11.15.
🎺 For readers with little ones aged 0-18 months old, Babies Adventures in Music returns to the MAC from tomorrow, bringing stimulating sounds in 30 minute performances. Tickets are £10.50 for an adult and child, and £6 for an additional child.
There’s been a surge in ‘ghost patients’. But what’s really going on?
We try to explain a widely reported story
By Kate Knowles
This year opened with a flurry of news stories, local and national, about “ghost patients”. Not, as the term might suggest, some terrifying visit by occupants of an NHS waiting room from beyond the grave, but a term used to describe patients who are signed up with a GP despite not living in the area. A common reason for this is that someone moves elsewhere without letting their GP know.
England has a lot of ghost patients apparently — 61% more than we did in 2018 according to Press Association analysis of NHS Digital and ONS statistics. The issue with this, as pointed out by titles from The Sun to the Express and Star, is that GP practices receive government funding per registered patient.
The Press Association story found that 62.9 million patients were registered at a GP practice in England on 1 November last year compared to a population of 57.1 million in 2022. This suggests about 5.8 million spooky souls are haunting our surgeries at a cost of approximately £955 million to the taxpayer. In Birmingham, this equates to more than 200,000 patients on the rolls who may not exist, and in the Black Country, more than 100,000. In 2019, the NHS Counter Fraud Authority (NHSCFA) even opened an investigation into whether GPs were claiming for nonexistent patients (it was halted due to a lack of data and needing to reprioritise work with the onset of Covid).
The trouble is that in reading most of these stories, there was little indication as to why this surge in ghosts has happened. In fact, every article I’ve seen quoted the same researcher at the right-leaning pressure group the TaxPayers’ Alliance and a few added in the same quotes from NHS England and the NHSCFA about what they are doing to limit the ghosts. The stories read as though they all originated with the same PA story, with some very slightly developed — but I was still left confused as to why we have an influx of ghosts in the first place.
