General public should be able to ask primary care providers to set
up services they choose
Members of the public should be able to petition councillors to ask primary care service providers to set up in their locality without being invited to do so by primary care trusts or their equivalents, a report published last week has argued.
Such services could involve pharmacists joining forces with GPs so that
all patients’ primary care requirements could be met in one location,
or even basing GPs in pharmacies, a researcher who worked on the Social Market Foundation report told The Journal.
“Registering choice — how primary care should change to meet
patient needs”, by Paul Corrigan, a former special adviser to the
Secretary of State for Health, argues that customer preference should
play a bigger
role in identifying primary care services that are a success and those
that are not.
“We need to help people organise their demand for new primary care … we
must not leave the whole process in the hands of PCTs,” he
says. “We need to create methods by which local demand can be translated
rapidly and directly into new provision,” he adds.
Professor Corrigan also argues that primary care providers themselves
must organise new forms of supply of primary care services. “There
has been some interest from pharmacists who already provide an important
primary care function.
“They could develop a much wider set of primary care services in
some localities, most notably in the high street. This would have a potentially
dramatic impact on capacity in locations where it is at the moment often
absent.”
The potential of pharmacies as a location for additional health care
services was also emphasised by Conservative Party leader David Cameron
this week. Speaking at the King’s Fund he said that genetic testing
in local pharmacies should one day become a reality. |
The
Pharmaceutical Journal
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