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48. Professor Martin Roland

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Professor Martin Roland is a respected and sometimes outspoken academic who continues to have a powerful impact on primary care policy.

A GP in Cambridge, he helped draw up the new GMS contract in 2004, worked on the expert panel that decided clinical QOF indicators before the responsibility was handed to NICE, and more recently advised on the drawing up of the GP Patient Survey.

This year, he published research showing that the satisfaction scores practices receive under the patient survey should be boosted by up to a fifth in deprived areas.

For the coming year, he is working on a way of ‘making sense' of all the patient surveys that GPs are measured by.

He says: ‘We now have three – the national GP Patient Survey, practice surveys done for the DES and now surveys for revalidation. It's a bizarre and irrational muddle which I'd like to help sort out.'

He has been critical of successive governments' ‘obsession' with access and the NHS reforms – but says they will also bring opportunities.

He says: ‘Certainly there's a huge responsibility on GPs to try and make the new arrangements work. And great opportunities if we can pull it off.'