The fairy godmother has spoken

[摘要] One of the occasional complaints voiced by UK GPs is that the planners and policy makers award so little attention to primary care. However, policy statements from the Department of Health have, in the recent past, often contained unwelcome surprises, and the prospect of a new policy statement is likely to cause very mixed feelings. So, the predominant response to the White Paper Our health, our care, our say: a new direction for community services'1 is likely to be a sigh of relief. General practice, as it is currently practised, receives a qualified vote of praise. The document is concerned with poor primary care provision in some areas of England and Wales, and for some groups of people, and proposes new methods for dealing with them. This has to be welcomed: such failures of conventional general practice have long been acknowledged and the difficulty of provision for disadvantaged groups is a stain on the face of UK primary care. Even the qualifications result in what are, for the most part, familiar recommendations and many of the so-called innovations are already in place in many practices. They include a repetition of access targets, a commitment to nurse triage, and better use of IT. Even in the section dealing with longer opening hours, the Department has begun to realise that extended hours are not compatible with personal continuity, which the public consultation has, again, identified as both a key strength and feature valued by patients. All the UK GPs who have been responsible for such innovations in the past few years may experience passing irritation at the Department of Health claiming ownership of their ideas, but they know a form of flattery is working here.

[学科分类] 卫生学