New HA rules will encourage fraud

I read with interest Kennedy Rath's letter (optician, February 20) about how his local health authority had increased the interval at which it would accept an examination fee claim for given patient groups. I can recall many instances where we have had to explain to patients that we cannot re-examine them under the NHS until a given date, and have watched them leave the practice armed with the knowledge required to obtain an eye examination and a spectacle voucher from any other optometrist simply by giving a false last date of examination. These are the people who know how to 'work the system'. It appears that local health authorities have no way of checking what any one patient has received in ophthalmic benefits, and the chances of this patient fraud being detected are minuscule. If we are to be faced with greater intervals between allowable examinations, is it not the case that we will lose more of our patients to the competition through no fault of our own, and there will be an associated increase in patient fraud? Perhaps if we are to be faced with this situation, our professional representatives should be prepared to require that the health boards and authorities have in place a procedure for preventing this type of problem. I am sure that, overall, patient fraud is a much more significant problem than practitioner fraud. RB MacGregor West Kilbride, Ayrshire