Yesterday the practice manager of a large Tower Hamlets practice (and CCG Board member) and I went to meet with Professor Nicholas Mays and two other authors of the Evaluation of the choice of GP practice, 2012-13 at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
We outlined the reasons why abandoning practice boundaries in Tower Hamlets would not be in the interests of our aim to provide good quality primary care services to our local communities. Quite to the contrary, why it would be harmful and destabilising.
We had an interesting conversation about the pilot, about the various competing aims, about unintended consequences, about politicians, and about pilots.
I believe their report is well written and contains a number of important points, and they have done a serious piece of work. But they were clear that their evaluation only evaluates the pilot, and not the policy. The pilot had small number of patients and in no way ‘tested’ the policy; in fact, the sorts of risks I have highlighted in my Submission to the Health Select Committee are not revealed by the pilot, they are hidden. (I expressed these concerns in an article for Pulse in December 2012.)
It is as though you invited smokers over the age of 70 to meet you at the top of a tall hill, and you asked them if they liked smoking and if it had impacted negatively on their health. It is likely that they would say that they enjoyed smoking, and it caused them no problems (hence their age and ability to get up the hill). You might conclude that smoking was a harmless pleasure.
One GP's Protest 