Health and change

ON Monday I met with several local GPs to discuss the government's NHS reforms.

These are changes that will see a huge shift from centralised control towards GPs being empowered to take decisions on healthcare commissioning. By 2013 Primary Care Trusts and Strategic Health Authorities will be abolished and consortia of GPs will be responsible for spending over 70% of the NHS budget.

A whopping 45% reduction in management overhead is anticipated by 2015, saving £20-billion. The Government will protect the NHS budget but will not stint on improving efficiency, so freeing up resources for more frontline care.

This will become more important with the challenges of an aging population combined with the rapidly rising cost of new treatments, drugs and surgical techniques.

Along with structural reform will come greater choice with patients able to select their consultant and GP, irrespective of where they live, and better information will be made available to patients so they are more able to assess their options.

There will, of course, be concerns related to any change of this scale but the NHS needs to do more with the resources available (our cancer and heart disease survival rates do not compare well with appropriate international standards) and these reforms should massively cut bureaucracy, increase patient choice and empower practitioners to focus on outcomes rather than box ticking.

There are issues that do need to be carefully thought through, however — one point put to me by GPs at our meeting is the importance of supporting local village surgeries within this model where a migration of patients away to other surgeries (perhaps close to where they work) might reduce a local surgery to below the level of viability. This is an aspect upon which I will press hard in Westminster.