Listen to patients over polyclinics, Buckman warns PM
BMA News
12 June 2008
GP leader Laurence Buckman has urged Prime Minister Gordon Brown to ‘take heed’ of the 1.2 million patients who signed the BMA’s Support Your Surgery campaign petitions.
Dr Buckman told GPs at the LMCs conference in London today (12/06/08) that the government did not appear to be listening to GPs, but that it could not ignore patients.
A standing ovation from the more than 400 delegates greeted his announcement that the total of petition signatures collected was 1,236,085.
Just hours before he was due to deliver the petition to 10 Downing Street, Dr Buckman said: ‘Without our patients’ support we are nothing.
‘Voters do not want funding to move from GP practices to commercial companies who are accountable primarily to shareholders rather than patients. They want to be treated as patients, not customers.’
He added: ‘My message to Gordon Brown is this: whatever you think of GPs, take note of what your electorate think.
‘We’re not saying we are perfect. We want to improve. But work with us to do that, not against us, and ignore at your peril the wishes of the most important people in the NHS – the patients.’
Dr Buckman told the conference: 'This dumbing down of general practice will spell the end of the generalist who can offer holistic care … it will see the rise of doctors in primary care who will know a lot about bits of the patient but not much about the family in context. This will be bad for these doctors and GPs and most importantly bad for the patients.”
‘Private unknown’
The BMA GPs committee launched the Support Your Surgery campaign last month to raise awareness of the potential threats GP practices face following three years of an effective freeze in resources and competition from polyclinics, GP-led health centres and new APMS (alternative provider medical services) practices.
GP leaders fear plans for a GP-led health centre in every one of the 150 PCTs across England, plus polyclinics across London, will duplicate services, waste money and destabilise existing GP practices.
They also believe that because of the style of bidding for contracts large commercial corporations will be more likely to win contracts to run services, leading to a ‘commercialisation’ that would not be in the long-term interests of patients.
Dr Buckman told the conference: ‘Our patients deserve better than an untried, hell-for-leather rush into the private unknown.’
He added: ‘Patients come to us because they see us as providing continuity. When asked how long we spend with patients we can say “25 years”. The government is chucking this away at their peril. Once the private sector is offering a service to see any doctor in a hurry, this priceless knowledge will be lost forever.’
But health secretary Alan Johnson has accused the BMA of ‘scaremongering’ and insisted that £250m in annual central funds would support the new services and not cause the closure of existing GP practices.
Dr Buckman warned that the ‘level of mutual mistrust’ between GPs and the government was ‘bad for society, corrosive to the body politic and dreadful for our patients’.
‘GPs just want to be left to get on with the job of healing the sick,’ he added.