A bit more bitching about the Liberating the NHS thing

There's a discussion about this on a friend of mine's Facebook status.
It's a friend of mine who's a GP but who's also studied business and has
just finished a Masters in Public Health at Harvard. Yes. I have some
fucking cool contacts. Anyway, here's what I said to him after I told
him he was wrong about outcome measure's versus process. I never know if
these thing sever work.

/What I disagree with is this leave it up to the doctors apporoach. The
figure that 1,800 people a year died because doctors were unnecessarily
using treatments for schizophrenia on old people with dementia
highlights the problem of autonomous medicine. It seems to have slipped
past the media too. Antipsychotics don't treat dementia. They need as
much regulation as the bankers, and perhaps more because 1,800 people is
higher than the homicide rate in the UK.

The Liberating the NHS white paper is total comedy but only in the
laughing to stop myself from crying sort of thing. They want to hand
over commissioning to GPs. Trish. You're a GP and I'd guess you'd be in
faviour of that?

Most practicing doctors know little about policy or commissioning.
You'[re probably the exception rather than the rule if you actually read
the white paper, or any government poilicy document or strategy. GPs
have a very tough role in medicine where they need to be up to date on a
lot of stuff across a wide range of areas. They spend their time reading
GP, Pulse, the BMJ or other stuff like that. I've never seen my dad read
a government document though.

So all the stuff that's been done in the past is simply going to be
ignored and if GPs are going to do their new job well they'll have to
cut back on keeping up with medical science.

I have the rare privelidge of being pretty loony so access services and
also read the policy reports and the research. I didn't bother to
respond to the consultation on this white paper because I've somewhat
given up through my own experiences of attampting to access NHS care.
For all the vision what matters is what happens in practice. Little of
the vision of the past strategies and policy documents gets seen in
practice. Getting GPs to commission services is going to make the gap
between the vision and practice even larger. It's why it makes sense to
me to keep the current commissioning system.
/