Worries have been expressed by Dr Iain Morrison, chairman of the BMA’s Scottish GPs committee, who told Radio Scotland Breakfast (RSB): “In terms of any pilot it’s important to learn to fail fast.
“My concern is that we’re not going to learn to close this down when all the evidence suggests that it’s not working
“It’s going to continue to be worked upon, potentially expanded despite evidence crying out that it’s not have the impact that’s desired.”
He said it would appear the scheme, which was announced at the SNP conference prior to the Holyrood election, was more about politics rather than practicality.
Last year First Minister John Swinney previously said the walk-in clinics would deliver more than one million additional GP and nurse appointments.
Dr Morrison said GPs had expressed reservations about the scheme at the time – and it looked like it was a case of “I’ve told you so”.
He added: “The way you improve capacity, to provide as many appointments as are required, is to invest into core services. It’s not to put in additional money into separate services that fail to alleviate the core problem”
Dr Morrison said ministers should have learned lessons from a similar scheme introduced in England nearly 20 years ago, which failed to relieve pressure on other NHS services.
Many of those walk-in centres were subsequently either shut down or repurposed into other services such as emergency care centres.
He said studies of the English scheme found that 20% of people who used the services, would not have sought medical help if the centres had not existed, which suggested they led to increased demand on finite NHS resources.
The medic accepted that low take-up might in part be due to the centres not being adequately publicised, but even if that were fixed, he said there were still problems.
He explained: “There’s limitations on the people they will agree to see, they are not open to the whole of the community, some of them only act within certain GP clusters or are available to a certain number of GP practices locally whereas the vast majority of the people of Scotland have no access at all to these walk-in centres.”