Public involvement part of Labour’s vision for primary care
pharmafile | June 28, 2005 | News story | |Â Â Â
Health secretary Patricia Hewitt has announced plans for a major public engagement exercise to help make far-reaching changes to primary care services.
Hewitt's radical plans will see a series of mass town hall meetings held across the country, where the public will get their say on new initiatives like teenager surgeries and voucher schemes to extend patient choice in primary care.
The proposal is part of the health secretary's radical shake-up of GP services. A key element of this will be the creation of super surgeries providing a far wider range of services than currently available in the community.
Strong opposition emerged to the plans during this year's election and the NHS tsar for primary care Dr David Colin-Thome recently voiced his concerns about the shift towards larger surgeries.
"We don't want to throw away the baby with the bathwater of traditional general practice," warned Dr Colin-Thome in last month's Pharmafocus.
But the government dismissed any suggestion that the reforms would mean the end of the 'family doctor'.
The government is nevertheless ready to offer GPs incentives to give up their smaller practices in favour of far larger surgeries with many more partners and facilities and equipment for day surgery and diagnostic tests.
Labour will be anxious to achieve 'buy-in' from the general public in its plans to revolutionise services and avoid a backlash among primary care staff – a purpose for which the consultation is well suited.
"This will be a major, large-scale deliberative event taking place at the local, regional and national level beyond anything the Government has embarked upon before in the health field," commented Hewitt.
The ambitious plans will also help to educate the public in the limitations of the health service, and promote awareness of issues such as self-care and healthy lifestyles.
But the health secretary was candid about the size of the task in front of the government and the problems of reaching a consensus with patients about the future of the NHS.
"We in government need to be honest and share with people the challenges, difficulties and trade-offs we face – the costs as well as the benefits – if we're going to transform health and healthcare in this country," she added.
Hewitt's radical proposals include specialist surgeries for teenagers and allowing patients to register with GPs near their place of work, a move she believes is a better reflection of modern lifestyles.
The health secretary laid out the plans in more detail at a recent meeting with professional executive committee chairs of PCTs, saying that patients would be registered with one GP but have the option of getting elements of their care from other providers, possibly through a voucher scheme.
Other ideas up for discussion include helping patients book routine and urgent appointments and improving access to GPs in the evening.
Hewitt also wants to grant GPs further autonomy in order to carry out diagnostic scans, an extension of the government's plans to shift diagnostic and surgical treatment away from hospitals and into primary care.
The plans, to be set out in a white paper at the end of the year, have been welcomed by the NHS Alliance, the organisation that represents primary care in the UK.
Alliance chairman Dr Michael Dixon said it was important that the views of patients were heard but stressed that the UK had a high quality GP service.
