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
