MANY GPs in York will be closing their surgery doors on Saturday mornings after the expansion of an out-of-hours emergency care service.

From Saturday, patients at 22 surgeries will have to travel to Monkgate Health Centre for an appointment rather than visit their local surgery.

Tadcaster Medical Centre is also affected by the changes.

If patients are too unwell to travel, a call-out system will be available under the new service provided by the North Yorkshire Emergency Doctors Service (NYED), which has run an out-of-hours service since 1996.

The out-of-hours period has previously not included 8am until 10.30am each Saturday, when many GP practices in the York area opened their own surgeries.

However, most local doctors have now decided to rely instead on NYED from 6pm on Friday night until 8am on Monday morning, as well as from 6pm to 8am on each weekday.

NYED already runs a Saturday morning service in Harrogate and Catterick.

To use the new Saturday morning service, patients with an urgent medical need out of hours should telephone their normal GP practice, from where they will be directed to NYED.

The service will not apply to doctors at Acomb Health Centre and Dalton Terrace, who are not members of the NYED co-operative and make their own arrangements for dealing with out-of-hours calls.

NYED general manager Mark Cockerton said: "This is good news for patients as the NYED system is very highly rated by patients and the access to a doctor for those with urgent health needs is very good.

"In addition, it reduces the burden on family doctors, which is important given the recruitment difficulties being faced by many practices at the moment."

Each practice using NYED on Saturday mornings will be informing its own patients.

Updated: 10:10 Thursday, April 03, 2003