Jeremy Hunt MP: primary care and the role of the GP

What place a family doctor in a post family society? While I share much of Mr Hunt's analysis and indeed wrote about the issues in "The Challege for Primary care" a few years ago - we should not underestimate the challenge of cultural change or ignore the heterogeneity of the current primary care workforce where responsibility and accountability need redefining.
A few years ago (2008) a"Transforming Primary care" programme in Leicester included annual review visits to all practices - a big capacity challenge to the PCT and practices - but only through this kind of holistic,local and challenging review programme can we build twenty first century General practice

This speech was written by someone with a deep understanding of the role that GPs should be fulfilling in the health system. Credit where credit is due, the Secretary of State deserves congratulations for so clearly identifying those aspects of general practice that need to be preserved and strengthened, and those that must change. We need to remove the perverse incentives preventing GPs from focusing on what matters to patients. Mr Hunt has presented the profession and the health service with an opportunity that must be siezed.

To my mind this captures the very essence of the future challenge of population based healthcare and goes some of the way towards providing some of the indicative answers. Hunt is right that we need to tilt the planning efforts from inputs ("bio medical tick boxes") to healthcare outcomes - at a population as well as individual patient level. Most other large customer facing industries have been through this pain barrier, the timing is surely now right for health (and social) care to do the same. Like to know who the speechwriter was.

Excellent video and looking more closely at outcome is key to service redesign and planning. This should include user engagement and liaison from all key relevant professional groups