The Government’s plan to extend doctors’ surgery hours to evenings and weekends would not be a good use of NHS resources, nearly three quarters of GPs say.

A survey published by the British Medical Association (BMA) found that 53.3 per cent of GP partners would consider extending opening hours if extra funding to run clinics outside office hours were available. But 72.5 per cent of the 11,000 GPs surveyed did not believe that it would be a good use of NHS resources.

The Prime Minister has emphasised that extending access to GP care is a priority, after changes to the GP contract in 2004 that allowed doctors to give up providing out-of-hours care and granted them generous pay rises.

Although they now earn an average salary in excess of £100,000, the BMA said that morale among GPs was still low, with one in six family doctors contemplating a career change. It blamed low morale on fears about NHS privatisation and the undermining of the core values of general practice.

Patients could be allowed to register with more than one GP under plans to offer services nearer to people’s work-places. Retailers such as Boots, Virgin, Asda and Morrison’s have offered to let space to GPs for use as surgeries in their shops. But the BMA said such a move could lead to confusion and damage patient care.

GPs were uneasy about policies which they saw as putting cost-cutting ahead of quality, the BMA said, and they complained that they had been subjected to a long-running “doctor-bashing” campaign.

More than half of GPs who took part in the survey said that their working conditions were worse now than five years ago. Nearly two thirds said that NHS changes had made it harder to practise good medicine. The survey found that only just over half would recommend a career as a GP to an undergraduate.

Laurence Buckman, chairman of the BMA’s general practitioners’ committee, said: “GPs are worried about the future of general practice in this country. Without additional funding for extended hours, surgeries will have to close during the day so they can be open in the evening. Fewer daytime appointments will affect the patients who use and need us the most: the elderly, the very young and those with long-term conditions would lose out.”

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