North Yorkshire's emergency doctor service is to get a fleet of state-of-the-art new call-out cars in an effort to improve services for patients.

The seven new VW Passat estates, worth nearly £20,000 each, will be equipped with on-board computers, mobile communications equipment, panic alarms, resuscitation kits and defibrillators.

Managers of the service, which covers most of North Yorkshire, hope it will enable on-call doctors to respond more quickly and efficiently to night-time and weekend call-outs.

The new cars, which will be leased by the service for three years, will be phased in in March to replace seven of the service's existing fleet of 11 ageing estate cars.

The service handles about 130,000 calls a year. Half of those are dealt with by phone, and in a quarter of cases patients are advised to call in at their local primary care centre - in York's case the Monkgate health centre.

In about a quarter of cases on-call doctors actually visit a patient's home.

Emergency doctors' general manager Mark Cockerton, who took over as general manager about a month ago, said part of his job was to 're-educate' the public about how the service worked.

He said the primary care centres had first-class equipment and facilities, and it was often better - and quicker - for patients to be treated there than in their own homes.

But in cases where doctors did have to go out, the new cars, each driven by a specially-trained driver, should make it easier for them to respond quickly.

He said: "The communications equipment will be state-of-the-art.

"In the long-run it should speed up the passing on of information and so help improve the service."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.