Organising Health Care.
The Government has asked GPs to help the Primary Care Trust (PCT) change local services. There are existing policies to deliver more services closer to patients in the community with less use of the hospital buildings. The mechanism is called Practice Based Commissioning. We are supposed to take plans to the PCT and rearrange services within our allocated budget.
Our plan is to bring commonly used services to the surgeries and integrate them with the GP service. We have been doing this for some years and have expanded our diabetes, asthma, heart disease, minor surgery and other services to do this. We have used our resources to employ more doctors and reduced our need to use outside resources. We would like to expand this in to mental health care and rehabilitation at our surgeries. We would look at providing others. We wish to co-operate with other local surgeries to commission services in providing some joint services and buying in clinic services from specialists.
Currently the pressure is to follow the Darzi plan. The plan for London assumes that more hospital services can be delivered in Polyclinics (large combined GP and specialist units) and be removed from GPs and delivered by hospital outreach by disease (e.g. moving our diabetic services from here to the hospital team). We do not think this will work out of London. The Royal College of GPs has been working on these issues and has produced an alternative plan –the Road Map –which is similar to our vision. We will continue to lobby the local change process and feel that locally and nationally GPs are changing the plan.
Locally this means that we are not moving to the Eagle Bridge Development. We wish to co-operate with other practices to have a network of services. We wish to create communities around the surgeries and have voluntary organisations to help you with changes to lifestyle that will keep you well and not requiring management of disease at all.
We would like to know whether you agree with us in this policy.
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