Elderly patients and people on low incomes are being ripped off in a new telephone scandal that's using Britain's GPs as unwitting accomplices.
Callers to local GPs' surgeries are finding that the old landline number has been replaced with a "lo-call" 0844 number that means many patients have to pay for the call for the first time.
Millions of patients have bundled call packages that allow them to ring any landline for free - except for non-geographic numbers like 0870, 0845 and, in this case, 0844.
This means that ringing the old surgery landline would cost them nothing, but ringing the new 0844 number will cost them extra.
I discoverered this when I rang my GP and found the landline number dead. I tried from a different phone, and looked the number up again. Still dead.
I looked it up online at BT.com, but the landline number was still the same.
Worried that something might have happened to the surgery, I drove several miles to it only to find everything fine and a receptionist who couldn't understand why I was bothered that the number had been changed to an 0844.
I pointed out that patients would now have to pay when they might not have had to previously, but she was unmoved.
The Practice Manager intervened and tried to convince me that the surgery was doing patients a favour by having a number that was cheaper to ring than before.
She was either unaware or didn't care that the huge number of patients with bundled calls were now having to pay for the first time.
She claimed that the system was forced upon the surgery by the Government which had decreed that new call management systems had to be in place and that they could only be used with an 0844 number.
The first condition might well be true, but it is preposterous to claim that a call management system can only be used with an 0844 number attached.
It can, of course, be used with any telephone number you like, but the chances are that some provider somewhere is profiting from locking surgeries into a costly "lo call" number on false pretences.
I asked why the surgery hadn't told me about the change of number. The Practice Manager told me that it would have cost too much to inform the surgery's 1,800 patients.
Really? At the very least, she should have written to everyone to warn them. No-one cares if a supermarket changes its number, but a GP's surgery is in a position of far greater responsibility to its users.
I protested that the old landline number didn't even have a message on it telling patients to ring the new number, but the manager told me it had had one for six months and it again couldn't afford to keep the line going.
Had I visited the surgery more regularly, she said, I would have known about the change long ago. But as the GP does an excellent job and I'm fortunately healthy as a result, that's not much of an argument.
I pointed out that I'd looked up the number on bt.com, the most authoritative online directory enquiries service, and there was no mention of the new number.
The manager said she'd protested to BT but been told it would take a year before it could be changed.
I may not be a techie, but I do know that websites can be updated in a matter of seconds.
Was the manager trying to pull the wool over my eyes, or were BT pulling the wool over hers?
"What else could I have done?" she asked.
Well, how about not changing the number to an 0844 rip-off number in the first place; writing to every patient, even the healthy ones who reduce the surgery's workload by not bothering them unnecessarily; questioning the authorities if, indeed, the new number was imposed on the surgery, so that patients don't lose out; and going to the Press to raise the issue on behalf of patients if, as she claimed, it was imposed from above and the surgery genuinely had no choice.
"You're the only person who has complained," she told me.
Perhaps, but that might well be because other equally healthy patients haven't yet discovered what the surgery has done because they haven't needed to ring it, and because the little old ladies on fixed incomes aren't yet aware that the call they make to their GP will be costing them for the first time and will suddenly appear on their phone bill.
This is a disgrace, and flies in the face of the growing campaign against such rip-off lines - a campaign that Which?, the consumer magazine, highlighted only last week in a story on the BBC News website at news.bbc.co.uk
Jon McKnight
Author of Sort The Bastards!
