OUT-OF-HOURS care in York and North Yorkshire will not be affected by family doctors deciding to stop working at nights and weekends, health chiefs said today.

Doctors will be able to opt out of working anti-social shifts for the first time under the new General Medical Services (GMS) contract, which will come into force on January 1, 2005.

The responsibility for providing the emergency doctors service will then fall to local primary care trusts (PCTs).

Nationally, it is thought that nine out of ten doctors will stop working the shifts, putting pressure on some hospital A & E departments.

But Denise Smith, head of primary care delivery at the PCT, says patients in North Yorkshire should not notice the difference.

"They will still receive high-quality, out-of-hours services and it will still be a GP-led model. It will just be the relationship that will change," she said.

She said the trust will commission North Yorkshire Emergency Doctors (NYED), which currently runs a service from Monkgate in York, to continue its service and employ GPs from its existing staff roll.

Although all doctors had opted out of the 24-hour responsibility, most had said they would continue to work for NYED under the new arrangement.

The service should be rolled out across North Yorkshire by October 1.

New cash has been allocated for the handover, along with some money already in the system.

"We don't expect patients to notice any difference," she said. "For the majority of practices within the PCT area this service is already provided through NYED."

A spokesman for York Hospitals NHS Trust said he did not expect the changes to affect the A & E department.

Nationally, the Commons Health Select Committee is calling for an expansion of the 24-hour telephone service NHS Direct to cope with additional calls from patients worried about finding a doctor out of hours.

Updated: 09:33 Saturday, August 07, 2004