With The Worst Of Times Comes The Best Of Times

Main Category: Primary Care / General Practice
Article Date: 20 Oct 2009 - 18:00 PDT

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Primary care is the key to the NHS survival in a challenging economic climate, says the NHS Alliance.

In his speech at the NHS Alliance 12th Annual Conference in Manchester, chairman Dr Michael Dixon will call for the system to be dismantled to tackle the gap between centre and the front line, between secondary and primary care and between manager and clinician.

He will also highlight the benefits of 'cooperative commissioning' and the dangers of a full blown NHS market. "There is a danger that we may go for too much market and render the NHS bankrupt," he will say. "A free market requires excess capacity. That is expensive. Also, a full blown NHS market turns the patient, who was simply a tin of beans in the old system, into a pot of gold in the new. A pot of gold everyone wants a part of."

Dr Dixon will say that, with the upcoming elections next year, the NHS is going through a phase of 'policy impermanence', with ministers and director generals of commissioning changing almost as fast as the weather. "There is an ever widening disconnect between the high ideas, the discussions and the resolutions in Whitehall and those who are struggling to deliver their best for patients at the frontline of the NHS.

"Clinicians, in particular, are too often alienated. Forget leading, far too many are not even engaged. Commissioning, in the sense of radical redesign, is the exception rather than the rule - even after nearly 20 years of trying."

The solution, which will also enable the NHS to survive in the current tough economic climate, is to forge a system that values local communities and services, "an NHS that sees care as being about people and relationships, which builds on those personal relationships between frontline clinicians and their patients to develop productive corporate relationships between local people, clinicians and managers - not a system that fractures them. In short, a national 'co-production' service."

Source
NHS Alliance

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