Top doctors believe PCTs should stay
pharmafile | January 17, 2011 | News story | | BMA, NHS, NHS reforms, PCTs, Royal College of GP
Leading GPs have criticised the government’s wide-ranging NHS reforms, saying minor structural changes are all the health service needs.
A health bill based on the government’s summer White Paper will be published this week outlining reforms that aim to remove the current centralised NHS management system of primary care trusts and strategic health authorities and replace them with regional GP consortia.
This decision has been controversial and the measures are being heralded as the greatest overhaul of the NHS since its inception in 1948.
But Dr Claire Gerada, chairman of the Royal College of GPs, told the BBC the changes did not need to be so radical: “You could have simply mandated to ensure GPs had more of an influence on PCT boards – and achieved largely the same results.
“You would probably want a majority of clinicians, mostly GPs but other NHS staff too. It is not too late to change.
“By doing that GPs would have become heavily involved in making the decisions, we could have still made management savings, but without all the upheaval that the NHS is going through.”
Her views were backed up by Dr Laurence Buckman, chairman of the BMA, who said: “We have chaos in management in the health service and that would have been avoided. It could have been that simple.”
Buckman went further and said the aim of the reforms was privatisation: “By setting up consortia it gives the impression that decisions are being taken further away from the centre,” he told the BBC.
The government has rejected these suggestions and a Department of Health spokesman said that PCTs were “too remote” from patients.
“Simply putting more GPs on a PCT board would not have delivered the changes that are necessary, and would have simply added more layers to the existing NHS bureaucracy,” the spokesman added.
The government has already established a pilot scheme of 52 pathfinder consortia that will take responsibility for around 80% of the £105 billion NHS budget in England by 2013.
Ben Adams
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