The Scottish Government has pledged to support a GP recruitment drive after figures showed a drop in the numbers of doctors across the country.

The Primary Care Workforce Survey, published on Tuesday, revealed the number of GPs had fallen by 2.4% in the 2013 to 2015 period.

According to the statistics, published by the Information Services Division (ISD) of NHS Scotland, there are 90 fewer whole time equivalent GPs, dropping from 3735 to 3645.

The Royal College for General Practitioners (RCGP) Scotland warned that 830 extra GPs were now needed to return to the numbers of 2009.

Responding to the figures, health minister Shona Robison announced a series of projects to improve GP recruitment.

She pledged to put £2m of the £85m Primary Care Fund towards schemes including the development of a locum pool of retired GPs in the Lothian area and a GP recruitment programme run by the RCGP.

A Scottish Rural Medicine Collaborative will also be formed to support GPs working in remote and rural areas.

Robison said: "As the Primary Care Workforce Survey published today shows, there still remain challenges in recruiting and retaining doctors to work in general practice.

"While Scotland continues to have the highest number of GPs per patient in the UK, we still need to act now to redesign the way care is provided in the community to ensure these services are sustainable in the future."

Robison said primary care and GP services needed to be "transformed" to allow the service to work more efficiently.

She added: "We have allocated £20m over the next year to ease some of the immediate challenges facing the GP workforce. We will also continue our work with the profession to negotiate a new GP contract for 2017."

Since 2013, RCGP Scotland campaigned for the share of NHS Scotland funding given to general practices to be incrementally raised to 11%.

The organisation claims the move would "halt and reverse a decade of cuts".

Dr Miles Mack, chairman of RCGP Scotland, said: "We are concerned that the 100 extra GP training places promised in October 2015, to start this current year, have not come about and that we have yet to hear a timescale for their delivery.

"Twenty per cent of last year's training places went unfilled. We need urgent measures to make sure those places are available and taken up.

"There are large numbers of medical students qualifying who have not yet chosen to pursue a career in general practice. We want to change that.

"To be able to look after an ageing population with increasingly complex needs will need general practice to again be the most desirable career in medicine. It is obvious that additional resources will be needed to achieve this."

Opposition MSPs hit out at the figures, with Scottish Conservative shadow health secretary Donald Cameron claiming the Scottish Government "ignored warnings" about dwindling GP numbers.

He said: "As a result, patients are paying the price, appointments are hard to come by and those GPs left are feeling overstretched."

Liberal Democrat Alex Cole-Hamilton said calls for extra support had "fallen on deaf ears".

He said: "The prescription for primary care is clear - additional funding in GP services and support for doctors, nurses and practice staff who are often our first port of call when we are unwell."

Scottish Labour shadow health secretary Anas Sarwar said: "The SNP Government in Edinburgh has created the biggest crisis in family doctors for a generation, with over £1bn cut from primary care."