Medical card patients attend their GP twice as much as private patients, a new Irish study indicates.

According to researchers, this suggests that the Government's stated aim of introducing free GP care for everyone ‘would have considerable workload implications for general practice'.

The researchers analysed the GP consultations that took place with more than 20,000 patients aged 18 and older in six general practices over the 12-month period October 2012 to October 2013.

While previous data had indicated that people attend their GP just over three times per year, this study found that the average annual consultation rate was actually higher - at just over five times per year.

However, a breakdown of the figures revealed big differences between the attendance rate of private and medical card patients. Private patients attended their GP an average of just over three times per year, while medical card patients under the age of 70 attended seven times per year. Medical card patients over the age of 70 attended at least nine times per year.

The study also noted that patients with ‘discretionary' medical cards attended their GP an average of eight times per year.

The researchers said that when these study findings are applied to the population as a whole, they indicate that around 24 million GP consultations take place every year in Ireland - 15 million of which are with medical card patients.

The researchers also pointed out that if private patients were to attend their GPs at the same rate as medical card patients, this would lead to an extra 4.4 million consultations per year.

The team said that accurate data on workload and health service utilisation is necessary to provide a better health service, however current official data ‘appears to greatly under-reflect workload in general practice, both current and future'.

"Significant changes in national health policy should only be made if the data supporting the transformation is both reliable and convincing. Utilising current official data to plan future workload will lead to very unpredictable results," they warned.

Details of these findings are published in the Irish Medical Journal.