NHS Patient Safety at a Crossroads: Ghost Patients, Martha's Rule, and the Cost of Silence

An NHS policy to remove inactive "ghost patients" from GP lists is inadvertently stripping vulnerable people from the poorest communities of their access to healthcare. Analysis by Healthtech-1 shows 483,019 patients were removed from registered GP lists between October 2025 and July 2026 after the cut-off period for responding to outreach was halved from six to three months. Crucially, the most deprived fifth of practices accounted for 138,400 of those removals—nearly 30%...