1. No one voted for a coalition government but Andrew Lansley is a Conservative health secretary and GP‘s pre-election poll suggested most GPs backed the Tories.
2. Coalition government health policies put GPs at the driving wheel of the NHS. So if GPs want to outsource management, they can do. The choice, as they say, is yours. Or, even, no decision about me, without me. At least at the very beginning.
Welcome to our round-up of GP‘s most popular blogs. 2010′s most commented blog was the fifth most popular read.
It described July health White Paper Liberating the NHS as begging more questions than it answers and was picked up by The Guardian.
I’ve never thought of interviews with health secretaries as like waiting for buses but I’m starting to now.
Earlier this year I blogged that GP newspaper’s exclusive interview with then health secretary Andy Burnham was the first I’d known in my near 10-year career here.
The first NHS Alliance/RCGP White Paper listening event took place in London last Thursday.
There’s nothing quite so enlightening as hearing at first hand from GPs as I did about the opportunities and challenges health secretary Andrew Lansley’s GP commissioning vision creates.
Healthcare Republic reports on Wednesday that PCT debts are likely to transfer to GP consortia when the profession takes on commissioning.
So far, so grim. And could the health White Paper also allow patients flush with their tax-funded care allocations (or ‘patient budgets’) to choose their GP consortia?
Will the private sector cash in on the lack of management expertise of GP consortia due to run an annual £80 billion commissioning budget in England by 2013 under White Paper plans?
It’s been a funny old week writing about general practice. On Thursday Healthcare Republic reported that the White Paper meant a proportion of GP practice income would be linked to the outcomes that commissioning consortia achieve.
Yet another thing that will surely come to an end under the
White Paper reforms is the Great Wall that stands between general practice and
hospital care.
For 60 years the barrier has remained intact, bolstered by
prejudice and petty resentments, untouched by so many health service
reorganisations.
It’s been a bad week for PCTs. Having been told on Monday
that they were going to be abolished, on Thursday they were very publicly
reminded of why so many people think abolition is the best thing for them.
Within a White Paper that touches virtually every part of
the NHS, there is no mention of the word ‘revalidation’.
As we all know, the government has recently delayed
implementation of the scheme by a year, but does anyone now truly believe that
in the midst of the massive upheaval required to ‘liberate the NHS’ that time
and money will be spent on creating a new bureaucracy for revalidation?
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