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We must ensure patients’ needs come before profit
• I am writing to alert readers to an important consultation being run by the NHS locally.
The primary care trusts for Camden, City and Hackney, Haringey and Islington work together to commission out-of-hours GP services and are now going through a process to re-commission this service.
Camidoc has provided the out-of-hours care for these boroughs for 12 years. In that time we have successfully managed more than 750,000 calls from patients and have developed strong links within the health and social care communities. As a professional, not-for-profit organisation (we are a GPs’ co-operative) we have consistently put the needs of patients before profit.
The current contract for providing out-of-hours care expires later this year and we will, of course, be submitting a tender. Camden Primary Care Trust, the lead commissioner for the service, is consulting on the selection criteria for out-of-hours care.
I am sure many readers will share our concern that this vital service should continue to be delivered by local doctors and nurses with patients’ needs being put before profit.
We are also concerned that there is a level playing field so that this contract is not automatically given to one of the large private healthcare companies which are already making significant inroads into the NHS. We would urge readers to make sure you get your response in too and we can all help ensure we get the quality of services we deserve.
Responses should be sent by email to PALS@camdenpct.nhs.uk and by post to PALS, Camden PCT, Freepost RRCA-BHXE-HUSR, London NW1 0PE.
The consultation ends on March 22 and further information is available on the Camden PCT website www.camdenpct.nhs.uk.
Michael Golding
Chief executive, Camidoc
• The current row over the structuring of GP practices and opening hours arises much more from the activities of central government than from patient dissatisfaction (Surgeries ‘no better than cattle marts’, February 29).
As such, it fits into a depressing pattern of issues – post office closures, nuclear power, Heathrow airport expansion, invading Iraq – where it is all too obvious that the government decides on a policy and then proceeds to put it into action regardless of what most people think, creating smokescreens to disguise its true intentions.
In the case of GP surgeries, everyone who has followed the story at all closely must by now be aware that the government is determined to infiltrate American corporate providers into the British primary care system, come what may.
Quite why they are so keen to do so just when the American presidential candidates are arguing about how to change a healthcare system that manifestly doesn’t work there is a matter for psychiatrists to debate, but they are busy trying to create the impression that in Britain there is widespread dissatisfaction with the way GPs currently operate.
People are being led to believe that single practices are inefficient and unresponsive – in a word old-fashioned. It seems not to have occurred to ministers that people might actually prefer to leave things as they are; that constant reform and “modernisation”, accompanied by endless surveys, reviews and box-ticking, might, by distracting doctors from their prime business of treating patients, be incompatible with good service.
I want a GP whom I know and trust and has a full grasp of my medical history. I do not want a US-based polyclinic in a corner of Tesco’s where I can buy a bit of healthcare along with my baked beans. I would also like to have my views taken into account and not find my options closed down by increasingly dictatorial health authorities and primary care trusts.
David Gladstone
Address supplied
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