TOUGHER guidance urging GPs to report patients who continue to drive when not medically fit has been cautiously welcomed by a campaigning mum.

New advice by the General Medical Council states doctors have a duty to inform the authorities if a patient is driving against medical advice.

Doctors now do not need a patient’s consent to alert the DVLA when a patient has continued driving.

The guidance aims to help GPs balance their legal and ethical duties of confidentiality with wider public protection responsibilities.

It comes as campaigning mum, Jackie Rason, is calling for clinicians to do more to stop deaths on the road.

Jackie’s daughter Cassie McCord was 16 when she was killed by pensioner Colin Horsfall who drove on to the pavement in Head Street, Colchester. Three days earlier police officers had spent two hours trying to persuade Mr Horsfall, 87, to give up his driving licence.

He had failed an eye test after crashing into the exit of a petrol station.

Jackie said: “Anything they do to improve road safety is brilliant and it is great doctors are saying they can report them without having to tell the patient - before they had to notify the patient.

“However, unless we sort out re-testing and eye sight testing you are always going to be putting a sticking plaster on.”

Jackie believes no-one who fails a sight test should be driving, whatever their age.

Jackie added the advice for GPs was “discretionary” and does not go as far as a change in the law which would allow the DVLA to revoke driving licences if concerns are raised by doctors or opticians.

GPs can choose to inform the authorities if they believe there is a “risk of death or serious harm” to others.

Motoring offences lawyer Julie Robertson warned: “People trust their GP and these sort of breaches erode a really important relationship.”

As a result of Jackie’s determined campaign, which was supported by the Gazette and by former Colchester MP, Sir Bob Russell, the Government introduced Cassie’s Law which gave police fast-track powers to ask the DVLA to revoke a driver’s licence immediately where it was felt they were unsafe to drive.

Hundreds of licences have been seized under Cassie’s Law and hundreds of lives potentially saved.