GPs have been forced to stop providing a life-saving scan to patients after being told they were acting illegally.

Ultrasound screening for abdominal aortic aneurysms (AAA) can indicate whether a patient needs an urgent operation or monitoring for a condition that kills 7,000 men a year.

A ruptured aneurysm, in which the arteries of the stomach stretch, weaken and burst, can kill without warning. Yet despite calls for a national screening programme for all men aged 65, only a few areas are offering the scans on the NHS. The National Screening Committee recommended that AAA screening should be provided on the NHS in January last year but the Government has yet to approve a nationwide scheme, The Times reported yesterday.

Enterprising doctors have applied to local charities for grants to fund scans at hospitals such as Guy’s and St Thomas’ in London. But GPs who have offered patients a scan, costing £95, have been warned that they cannot legally do so within the bounds of the doctors’ contract.

James Morrow, a GP and medical director of New Medical Ltd, a company that has screened more than 14,000 patients across the South of England, said that men were dying needlessly in the absence of a publicly or privately funded screening programme.

But after pressure from the British Medical Association doctors had been discouraged from offering private screening at times when their surgeries were otherwise closed, he said.

The Vascular Society, which is campaigning for screening, claims that a national programme could cost £25 million and save 3,000 lives a year.

There was a significant number of patients who were willing to pay for scans, Dr Morrow said. Data on 11,000 consecutive patients scanned by New Medical revealed that just under 5 per cent had an aneurysm in their stomach. A significant proportion of those needed urgent surgery.

The BMA General Practitioners Committee has objected to GPs providing such a service. In a letter to Local Medical Committees, it claimed that doctors could be deemed in breach of their contracts even if they were receiving a fee for the use of their surgeries, and could incur breaches of the Data Protection Act 1998 by contacting patients on behalf of a company. A GP offering scans on such a basis may be liable to prosecution by the General Medical Council under fitness-to-practise procedures, the letter added.

Laurence Buckman, head of the GPC, said that provision of private services by doctors was a legal issue.

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