pounds 400m health plan dropped
Your support helps us to tell the story
From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging.
At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story.
The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political spectrum. And unlike many other quality news outlets, we choose not to lock Americans out of our reporting and analysis with paywalls. We believe quality journalism should be available to everyone, paid for by those who can afford it.
Your support makes all the difference.Stephen Dorrell, the Secretary of State for Health, has scrapped a controversial health- promotion programme by GPs on which the Government has spent more than pounds 400m over the past six years.
In a deal with the British Medical Association's family doctors' committee he has agreed that from the autumn GPs will be free to agree their own health-promotion activities locally with health authorities and be paid for them.
Since 1990, in one of the more controversial parts of the contract that Kenneth Clarke imposed on family doctors when Secretary of State for Health, they have been asked to count the numbers of their patients aged 15-74 who smoke and record their blood pressure, alcohol consumption and obesity, together with family histories of heart disease and stroke, and offer advice on better lifestyle.
At the time, academics said there was no evidence that such costly activity would improve health. And the degree of form- filling left GPs complaining that the scheme was bureaucratic, untargeted and involved counting numbers rather than improving patients' health.
The death-knell for the scheme came in 1994 with an evaluation of the British Family Heart Study. It demonstrated that much more intensive interventions by nurses aimed at changing lifestyle were "of little benefit" and concluded that given that the approach the GPs were being asked to follow was less intensive, the benefit was "likely to be even smaller".
After the prescriptive approach of the current programme, Mr Dorrell's new package goes to the other extreme, moving away from the increasingly intensive audit of doctors' activities. It allows GPs to decide with their local health authorities what is likely to be of most benefit, taking account of Health of the Nation targets and locally agreed priorities.
Family doctors will then set out the programmes they intend to follow, but once approved will then merely have to confirm they have carried out the agreed activities to be paid. The pounds 87.5m that the scheme cost last year remains in the system to pay for the new approach. A Department of Health spokesman said the change "recognises the professional skills of GPs in developing health promotion, cuts out paperwork and directs resources to patient care rather than form-filling."
Join our commenting forum
Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies
Comments