David Cameron's extraordinary comments yesterday show a worrying lack of understanding of what GPs really do, says Pulse deputy editor Steve Nowottny
Once upon a time, my mother was a GP in Witney, David Cameron’s constituency.
She did not, as far as I'm aware, ever meet him at a dinner party.
But if she had, I’m guessing it’s fairly unlikely that she would have offered him preferential access, or arranged to see him out of hours in the case of an emergency.
It seems an extraordinary thing to have to clarify - but then Mr Cameron’s outburst on GP access yesterday was indeed extraordinary.
He claimed - not off the cuff, but in a prepared, carefully drafted speech on public service reform – that: 'People with money can get friendly with their local GP at a dinner party, maybe see them out of hours if there's an emergency. In this world of restricted choice and freedom it's the poorest who lose out.'
Mr Cameron has clearly been mixing with the wrong kind of GP. It doesn't sound like my mum, and I'm guessing it doesn't sound like you or any of your colleagues either.
The case Mr Cameron was trying to make, of course, was for the opening up of competition and choice across the public sector, and particularly in primary care.
‘Open public services are going to mean you in control,’ he said. ‘No more take what you're given. No more like-it-or-lump-it. Right across public services we're putting you in charge like never before.'
The mantra of patient choice has become a familiar one from politicians of all stripes in recent years, of course. In this respect at least, Mr Cameron really is the heir to Blair.
But rather than grandstanding with unlikely tales of GPs offering their mobile number over the Beaujolais, Mr Cameron might have done better to sweat the detail, and look at how choice can best be offered.
There are major questions, for instance, over the Government’s flagship NHS Choices project, which allows patients to anonymously rate their GP practice. Pulse revealed yesterday that two years after reluctantly backing its launch, GPC leaders now believe it should be scrapped, with a handful of comments often unrepresentative of the practice they are supposed to describe.
There are questions too over the relaxing of practice boundaries, cited in Mr Cameron’s speech yesterday. So far the Government has said it plans to do it, and plans to do it soon, by next April. But they've yet to explain how.
And perhaps most significantly of all there are questions over the cost of choice - because as the sceptics never tire of pointing out, choice implies some element of extra capacity. Can the NHS really afford to offer greater patient choice as it struggles to achieve unprecedented efficiency savings?
Lots of questions then, and no easy answers. Perhaps Mr Cameron could run them by a local GP at his next dinner party?
Steve Nowottny is deputy editor of Pulse. Follow him on Twitter @stevenowottny.
