CONSERVATIVES have pledged their support to the family GP service, promising to preserve small community surgeries to allow patients to be seen by a doctor they know.
The party promised £45 million a year to allow practices to open their doors for Saturday morning surgeries, paid for from cuts in bureaucracy.
Shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley accused the Government of seeking to drive traditional family GPs out of the NHS system, with its plans for super-surgeries bringing together teams of doctors to provide a wider range of services.
Announcing pilots of the super-surgery scheme, Health Secretary John Reid promised that no GPs would be axed for wanting to work on their own in a "single-handed" practice.
But Mr Lansley accused him of wanting to transform the NHS's network of 9,000 local clinics into a chain of "remote mega-practices", open only during working hours.
Officially launching a campaign to "Save our GPs" in his South Cambridgeshire constituency, Mr Lansley estimated that one in three NHS practices would open their doors on Saturdays under Tory plans, offering out-of- hours appointments to 60,000 patients a week.
Cash to pay for the initiative would come from "cuts in Whitehall NHS bureaucracy" identified by the Conservatives' James Review of Government spending.
