In a letter to The Times, everyone’s second favourite diabetes charity writes about the NHS reforms in England and Wales. They say:
“The reforms will place £80 billion of the NHS budget into the hands of GPs, but plans to make GP consortia accountable to the public are far too weak.
The plans will allow local authorities to replace existing democratically elected overview and scrutiny committees with their own systems. Given the unprecedented devolution of power, we urge the Government to amend the Bill and insist on a strong independent scrutiny function led by democratically elected representatives.”
So what do we all think of said reforms?
Source: http://www.diabetes.org.uk/About_us/News_Landing_Page/Diabetes-UK-responds-to-NHS-reforms/
Obviously a) I live in Scotland and health is a devolved matter and b) I’m a dog; so any reforms don’t apply to me.
I don’t know how the reforms are going to work with regards to the fact that, like quite a few people on here, my diabetes care is not handled through my GP in any way (other than regular prescriptions for standard issue stuff like insulin, teststrips etc).
I want to know how a GP run consortium will decide on how to spend money on specialist treatment such as diabetes (pumps, CGM, etc), cancer care, eye care (retinopathy etc) that they have no specialist knowlegde of nor input into the care given.
Where do people who aren’t needing solely run-of-the-mill type treatments and have their care run from a hospital clinic going to fit in to the reforms? Can anyone with any understanding of the legalese they seem to want to use enlighten me?
Sincerely, confused.
🙂
@Annette There’s a reasonable explanation of it all on the BBC website – http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-12177084
Basically, the GP consortia will take over the role currently undertaken by PCTs. Quite how investing huge amounts in training Drs in medicine and then assuming this equips them to do a procurement role makes sense I’m not sure. Also, when a GP’s salary range goes from £53-£81k – http://www.nhscareers.nhs.uk/details/Default.aspx?Id=553 – they’re hardly the cheapest resource to do the job.
With regard to making decisions about specialist treatments, I suspect it will be similar to how it’s done now – a committee of generalists who go out to specialists to seek opinion when needed. When I was after CGM funding I had some interesting debates with the PCT committee on whether they, or indeed their chosen expert, actually knew enough about the subject they were offering opinions on. I think this would be an issue no matter who ran commissioning – PCTs or GPs – the important thing is that you need some method in place of holding the system to account and measuring how well it delivers.
Re hospital clinics. Currently PCTs commission the hospital to provide the specialist clinics. I assume this would stay the same, just that the GP consortia would do the commissioning instead. One change is that they’ll have more freedom to commission independent providers eg private companies, social enterprise companies etc with the aim of having more competition in the market.
I suspect all that might have just added to the confusion 😉
But how does he type?
@rosief The dog or the GP? GP’s have many years of training, of which at least 3 years are dedicated to computer skills (this may be slightly untrue), hence why my old GP used to leave his PC turned off and use it as a plant pot stand! As for Neville, he’s just a very special dog.