From this day next month, everyone aged 70 years or over will be entitled to a medical card. The form to apply for a card will be available from your local health board. The extension of the scheme, which was announced in last December's budget, is expected to cost the Department of Health an extra £7 million (€8.9 million) per annum.

At the beginning of this year, there were just over 250,000 people aged 70 or over with medical cards - 89 per cent of the total population of persons in that age category.

The final phase of the three year programme of doubling income limits for the elderly brought another 12,000 persons into the medical card scheme in March 2001, which leaves some 33,000 people to benefit from the budget provision. Spread over the number of relevant GPs, it works out at fewer than 20 new patients per GP.