NHS Reforms George Meyer, Simon Wasley & Matthew Taylor

Itinerary GP’s – Their Increased Budget Private Healthcare – An On-going Debate NHS Foundation Trust – Debt

GP’s The key to the government's reform is to put funding for the majority of patient care directly in the hands of general practitioners. The rationale is to reduce NHS management – which by international standards is already lean – and trust the people who provide our care with the responsibility to manage our public money. At a time when the highly respected Commonwealth Fund has just ranked the NHS as one of the most efficient and effective health systems in the world, this proposed transformation brings with it significant risks. Many critics feel that GPs with overall budget responsibility may become more concerned about keeping their costs down than with improving patient well-being, never mind broader community health. In addition, the complexities of contracting for service provision are immense, heavily bureaucratic and often adversarial, with high transaction costs including the need for timely information to make reliable decisions. Most GP practices currently are ill-equipped to undertake these responsibilities – some could do it, many cannot, probably most do not want to and a small but real number will exploit it for their ends.

GP’s The big problem is that not everyone is going to trust their GP for the highest standard of care. GP’s are going to spend billions of pounds of taxpayer money on behalf of patients through the creation of 500 GP consortia across The big problem is that if they are trusted with the money for the running of their practices will be based on what is going to be cost efficient, and not what is going to be best for GP consortia that fail to take this on board could miss out on improvements in efficiency that follow clinical audits and cost savings in areas such as prescribing budgets GP’s may be well placed to deliver tough messages to patients because they are held in high esteem GP’s must remain united & not become harsher performance managers than PCT’s.

Private Health Care – Argumnts For

Private Healthcare – Arguments Against