THE GPs magazine Pulse has revealed that both the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) and the BMA’s GP Committee have been excluded from the panel which will oversee the two-month government ‘listening exercise’ in a bid to win round critics to its NHS reforms.
Instead, former RCGP chair, Professor Steve Field, has been drafted in to head up the exercise.
Field has always been a major supporter of the government’s plans, calling them a ‘once in a lifetime opportunity for GPs’.
The ‘listening exercise’ will involve a questionnaire being sent to front-line NHS staff and patients. It will also include GPs, but largely those in pathfinder consortia.
Pulse notes that the government has indicated that it does not think there needs to be a major change of direction.
The exercise was quickly slammed by Professor Field’s successor, Dr Clare Gerada.
She told Pulse: ‘The Government had 6,000 responses to its consultation on the white paper.
‘It’s received endless representation from groups including the BMA, the RCGP, charities and patient groups, and the responses have all been the same or more or less the same.
‘I just don’t understand how having a listening exercise can do anything.
‘What we should be focusing on is the concerns about fragmentation, about the ramping up of marketisation and the emphasis on competition.
‘If this listening exercise is a sop to make it look like they are listening we will know. The Prime Minister going around hospitals and talking to people is not the same as listening.’
David Kerr, a health adviser under former Prime Minister Tony Blair and professor of cancer medicine, has also been tipped as a possible member of the panel.
But Dr Gerada said she had ‘major concerns’ about the questions that would be asked to GPs and patients in the survey.
She said: ‘If the questions are leading questions then there is no point. I’m very confused about what the government is trying to achieve when it already has been made very clear what GPs and other groups think of the bill.’
On March 15 at its SRM, the BMA demanded that health secretary Lansley withdraw the Health Bill, and BMA chairman Meldrum said that he, the BMA and the profession did not support it.
