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GP commissioners are damned if they do or if they don’t

The reality is that the British healthcare system has an indisputable need for primary care expansion for NHS delivery of scheduled and unscheduled care (Revealed: how CCGs are beginning to reshape primary care).

Clinical commissioning has therefore become a poisoned chalice in terms of national press coverage.

GP commissioners have the pernicious option of meeting the need to grow the provision in primary care in a co-ordinated fashion, including commissioning delivery activity from NHS GPs and thereby enduring the cheap jibes about ‘lining their pockets’.

Alternatively, they can take a moral high ground and not commission primary care services from NHS GPs (as every NHS GP must be a member of a CCG by statute). In that case the headlines will read: ‘GPs privatise the NHS.’

Currently, there seem to be two things for the national press to find fault with in GPs: everything we say and everything we do.

Dr Andrew Mimnagh, Sefton, Lancashire