GPs ‘should run local hospitals’ as part of NHS reform, says health secretary
GPs ‘should be able to run local hospitals’ as part of a radical reform of the NHS, the health secretary has said.
During a speech at NHS Confederation Expo conference this afternoon, Wes Streeting said the NHS ‘should not be bound by traditional expectations of how services should be arranged’.
He argued that acute trusts should be able to provide primary care services if this enables them to meet patients needs ‘in a more integrated way’, and that ‘successful GPs’ should be ‘able to run local hospitals’.
He said: ‘I am open to our strongest acute trusts providing not just community services, as they already do, but also primary care, whatever services will enable them to meet the needs of their patients in a more integrated way.
‘And likewise, there is no reason why successful GPs should not be able to run local hospitals, or why nurses should not be leading neighbourhood health services.’
He also said that ‘no one part of the NHS has a monopoly on good ideas’ and added that where providers are delivering ‘excellent care for patients at good value for taxpayers’, and where those providers ‘want to widen the pool of patients they care for’, then the Government ‘will encourage it’.
Mr Streeting said that thanks to the investment announced by the chancellor in yesterday’s spending review the NHS ‘will receive thousands more GPs to help build the neighbourhood health service’.
After the spending review, the BMA said that NHS budget allocations to be made in the coming weeks ‘will make or break general practice’.
BMA GP representatives are now looking ‘carefully’ at whether the funding will allow the Government to deliver the new GP contract it has committed to, and ‘crucially’ if it will address the ‘absurd situation’ where more GPs are needed, but GPs are currently struggling to find work.
During his speech, Mr Streeting said: ‘Of all the things we’ve done in the past 11 months, one of the things I’m most proud of is our work with GPs.
‘It’s not just that we’ve been able to deliver the biggest uplift in funding for years or the satisfaction of seeing a decision I took in my first weeks translate into more than 1,500 GPs employed on the frontline already as a result.
‘It’s actually the fact that we agreed a contract rather than imposing it, committed to further reform together, and it feels like we’re building a real partnership with the profession.’
He stressed the need for a radical reform of the NHS, adding that the publication of the Government’s 10-year plan for health, expected next month, will bring the ‘era of top-down control to an end’.
He added: ‘The 10-year plan will introduce incentives, freedoms flexibilities, and freedom from central control for local providers delivering a quality service.
‘We will also change the financial rules of the game, so foundation trusts can only succeed if they collaborate with community and mental health providers and GPs, focus on outcomes not activity, drive the left shift, and help to improve population health.’
Yesterday, NHS England said that the 10-year plan will be ‘GP-centric’ but that it will not come with huge shifts of funding from secondary to primary care immediately.
Earlier this month, the RCGP suggested that the plan is likely to be positive for general practice, following discussions with NHS England which were ‘reassuring on retention’, indicating that messaging around the importance of retaining GPs ‘has landed’.
As well as the upcoming 10-year plan, the health secretary has also committed to a ‘refreshed’ NHS workforce plan this summer, which will have a ‘laser-focus’ on boosting GP numbers.
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READERS' COMMENTS [11]
Please note, only GPs are permitted to add comments to articles
More hairbrained than usual
Flim flaming around again
Dash and Doyle Jim Mackay et al are taking the extra money and may get round to telling us at some point what the plan is
Does somebody have a monopoly though on not having read or understood any of the legislation and assessments relevant to their Ministerial areas of responsibility?
Yet more changes in the NHS. It is said fashions go in cycles; so has Health Sec, Wes, decided it’s time again for the ‘olden days’ ‘Cottage Hospitals’: I suppose all these changes and shuffling of NHS workload over the years, will enable the big Real Hospitals to syphon more workload onto GPs and the little Cottage Hospitals. These big plans do not address the fundamental issues like why big Real Hospitals and A and E Departments have insufficient capacity for the increasing population and progression of Scientific Advances and they feel they have no choice all the time, other than to discourage patients attending; or closing down departments, A and E’s, or whole local hospitals in fact, in order to ‘save money’ or ‘create efficiencies’ (when in reality, more money is needed, not scrimping and denying patients quality and choice).
GPs like to say ‘yes’ and that could be a big stumbling block when so many already, lack the appointments capacity; especially for something that will be seen by many, as part of just a fashion cycle for change and a different style of ‘mini-hospitals’.
Some will soon be calling for the return of NHSE (or a change of Health Secretary perhaps).
Here’s a crazy idea
Why not let GPs see patients who want to see a GP
And consultants see patients who neee to see a consultant.
This is not “working with GPs”, it’s creating more tiers of fragmented bureaucracy. GPs are GPs and Consultants are Consultants for good reasons. It feels to be the opposite of collaboration or integration. It sounds more like GPs will be further subsumed by Trusts and GPs will become responsible for virtual wards. GPs’ autonomy is central to their successful organisation. I agree with the comments above.
Wes’s bluesky fantasies. Somebody keep him away from the Haribos and Cola, he’s had enough. His breathless excitement is beginning to grate.
Feel betrayed by Labour. All of their spin-bollox seems to be ploys to move money from the taxpayer to Big Business, with some finding its muddied way into “creative” NHS schemes, inspired by Tony Blair, family and friends.
Totally left base thought but I’ll stick to medicine if he sticks to politics.
Please don’t mock Wes. Once he has “torn up the GP contract” as he promised due to those “murky partnership finances” we will all need these new hospital CEO non-clinical desk jobs with protected pay rises. So Wes has my full support.
I’ve even sent him more Haribo to fuel his plans for how GPs could see even fewer patients if we took over failing schools…..
Stay off the mushrooms , Wes.
I’m afraid it sounds like his message is ‘anybody should be allowed to run anything.’
This doesn’t sound like a coherent plan for the NHS, it sounds like chaos, and I’m afraid it sounds like he doesn’t really have any ideas. In the absence of anything looking like an actual plan, the £29 billion will disappear into maintaining the status quo with regards to hospitals, and the £10 billion set aside for digital transformation will disappear into the vast sucking void of expenses that is NHS IT.
Whatever you might say about the Lansley reforms, and lots of mistakes were made, at its core was a coherent policy idea:
‘Put GPs in charge of commissioning services for their patients, and let them commission the services from a variety of providers as long as they can meet quality standards.’
This represented a genuine chance to reduce the dominance of hospitals in the system, and force them to evolve into smaller, leaner, more efficient organisations whilst alongside them community based services grew and thrived.
However, it was sabotaged by the very managers who should have enacted it, out of organisational self-interest, and so almost fifteen years later here we are facing exactly the same problems.