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I whole-heartedly agree with Sir Liam but this will never happen whilst we have such a centralist, some may say Stalinist, command and control culture at the very top in the Health Service. To continue the analogy when the peasant farmers of the old Soviet Union failed to deliver on the five-year plans, they were eliminated en-masse and replaced with the collective farms that still failed to deliver but were better at manipulating the results. (Sound familiar?)
In order to break away from this stifling control culture, any planned changes must produce a significant improvement in the freedom of clinical staff to treat their patients appropriately, according to clinical needs and not according to central diktat. The UK has fewer doctors per capita than most of the developed world yet we needlessly burden our GPs, used as a free dumping ground for all life's problems be they medical, marital, social, spiritual or legal.
Patient charges may go some way to alleviating this. We pay for dentistry on the NHS, eye tests and doctors prescriptions. Why not pay for seeing the GP and get your prescription free? The Independent GPs Association (http://www.igpa.org.uk) exists to promote debate about the future funding of healthcare in this country. State health care or not, Stalin is still dead after all!
Dr Gareth Richards
Member of the IGPA
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Patient pays? [
