Newshound

Government “dumbing down” general practice

Publication date: 14 Jun 2008

BMA GP committee chairman Laurence Buckman has accused the government of attempting to “dumb down” general practice and bring an end to the generalist who provides holistic care.

In a fiery speech to the annual conference of local medical committees in London, Dr Buckman branded government plans to make GPs the front of hospitals to keep patients out of emergency departments and to have them acting as junior doctors on the wards “a strange notion.”

He added that the planned community specialists who would see self-referring patients were “a place to dump underemployed post CCT [certificate of completion of training] fellows who ought to get consultant jobs.”

“This dumbing down of general practice … will see the rise of clinics further away from the patients they serve and providing much less of the personal care and commitment they value. It will see the rise of doctors in primary care who will know a lot about bits of the patient but not much about the family in context,” he warned, emphasising that this would be bad for both doctors and patients.

After his speech Dr Buckman led a delegation of GPs to Downing Street to deliver a petition with more than 1.2 million signatures urging the government to support and invest in the current model of general practice rather than polyclinics.

See Dr Buckman’s full speech at http://www.bma.org.uk/ap.nsf/Content/BuckmanLMCConf08?OpenDocument&Login