A national initiative to find and remove “ghost patients” who are wrongly on GP patient lists has saved around £6.1m (€7.2m; $9.6m), claims the leading public spending watchdog.

In a new report, the Audit Commission said that around 95 000 records had been found of people who should not be on patients’ lists for various reasons such as having died or having moved to another doctor’s practice and been registered twice.

The BMA, however, said it was concerned that “over zealous” efforts to eliminate these anomalies in patients’ lists have gone too far in some places and mean some patients have been removed unfairly and mistakenly.

The commission’s report published on 23 February details its latest …