Rob Merrick: A different practice

Jun 18 2008 by Rob Merrick, Liverpool Daily Post

THE Government has taken away your post office, your local shop and your local police station – and now it’s gunning for your family doctor.

That is the claim made by the Conservatives, who have joined forces with the British Medical Association to wage war on plans for so-called "polyclinics".

These super-surgeries, bringing together up to 25 GPs under one roof, will gobble up your neighbourhood doctor, forcing you to travel much farther for a check- up – or so the Tories claim.

But Health Secretary Alan Johnson compared such "lies" to the infamous Tory-BMA double act that once described the NHS as something out of Nazi Germany. So what is the truth?

The first point is that the existing set-up badly needs shaking up – because many GP practices are in the wrong places and open at the wrong hours.

Because GPs run private businesses, the NHS has always struggled to get them to open surgeries in the neediest areas. It is an easier life in the leafy suburbs.

Added to that was the GPs’ success in brilliantly negotiating an enormous pay increase, while refusing to open up at hours to suit working people.

Therefore, the polyclinic proposal – open from 8am to 8pm, to any patient who walks in, offering tests and X-rays only available currently at a distant hospital – should be stunningly popular.

Furthermore, the Department of Health (DoH) has pledged £250m to ensure no existing GP practices will have to close. So what is the problem?

Well, first, the DoH appears to have admitted that patients will have to travel farther to see a GP in London, where polyclinics are arriving first.

Second, the independent Kings Fund has said of the plan: "It will destabilise the system unnecessarily and seems to be an enormous waste of taxpayers’ money."

And, third, there is the suspicion – no, certainty with this government – that we are seeing the creeping privatisation of the NHS.

We are told most centres will be run by groups of GPs, but in London and Derby GP surgeries have already been farmed out to big American health firms.

The danger is that patients will enjoy extra services – but at the price of swapping their familiar GP for a faceless corporation.

***

WESTMINSTER’S very own Rory Bremner is lurking in a corner of Merseyside – and his name is Shaun Woodward, the MP for St Helens South.

The Northern Ireland Secretary does a brilliant Tony Blair impression, a dazzling version of John Major and a magnificent turn as William Hague.

I can’t persuade him to turn into Gordon Brown – but who would want to do that at the moment?