NHS reassures Kingston patients over out-of-hours abuse (From Your Local Guardian)

NHS reassures Kingston patients over out-of-hours abuse

8:00am Saturday 4th February 2012 in Kingston By David Lindsell

Patients from Kingston would not have been affected by a GP who abused the out-of-hours service for south west London, NHS Kingston has said.

Dr Ravi Sondhi conducted a catalogue of abuses at Croydoc including withdrawing £100,000 without permission and not answering urgent calls from patients.

A damning NHS report concluded that until he was exposed in December 2009 the commissioners paying for the service, which included NHS Kingston, had failed “satisfactorily to monitor".

But NHS Kingston said this week that although out of hours calls went to the Croydoc call centre, Kingston GPs dealt with patients from the borough.

Croydoc was later dumped by NHS Kingston and replaced with Harmoni in December 2011.

A spokesman for NHS Kingston said: "Doctors on the Kingston GP list delivered the clinical component of the Kingston out of hours service, so we can reassure patients that they should not have been affected by the issues raised in the Croydoc report.

"NHS Kingston carried out monthly monitoring of the out of hours contract and no under performance issues were noted, with the exception of a short period in winter 2010/11 when the service was dealing with increased call volume - a trend reflected in other areas."

In December 2010, provider Patient Care 24, Croydoc's successor, failed to meet eight out of 13 targets, including abandoning 10 percent of calls from people trying to get hold of a GP.

A report to Kingston’s health and overview scrutiny committee last month showed performance had improved since new company Harmoni, was brought in during July 2011.

However five were still short of the 100 percent target in October 2011.

NHS Kingston directly received fewer than 10 patient complaints about the out-of-hours service during a two year period starting in 2009, it said.