Irwin Brown of the Socialist Health Association looks at GPs’ risks under the proposed new system.

We like our GPs - a lot. So we tell opinion pollster after opinion pollster.

PCTs, by contrast, don’t like GPs: they refer far too many people into expensive secondary care when they could be treated far more cheaply elsewhere. They make appointments hard to get, so people go off to expensive A&E instead. They have got away with working fewer hours, seeing fewer patients, whilst gaining the most financially out of the NHS reforms.

The Charge Of The Light Brigade: cavalry call for strategic sharpening-up and tactical slowdown
GPs seem to have woken up to the fact that Health Secretary Andrew 'The Liberator' Lansley's plans for them to charge the heavy artillery of NHS vested interests could involve their liberation from high levels of trust and popularity they apparently presently enjoy.

Well spotted, people.

The field of battle for this modern-day Charge Of The Light Brigade is not the Crimea.

This letter and all the related documents can be downloaded here.

TO:
All Chief Executives in NHS Trusts in England
All Chief Executives in NHS Foundation Trusts in England
All Chief Executives in Primary Care Trusts in England
All Chief Executives in Strategic Health Authorities in England
CC:
All Chairs of NHS organisations in England
All Chief Executives of Arm’s Length Bodies in England
All Chief Executives of Local Authorities in England

The Sunday Telegraph gets its NHS news priorities right, emphasising the core issue of car parking.

The Coalition Government has, it reports, decided that it will not honour New Labour's more-than-slightly-pointless promise to abolish car parking charges.

Shockwaves of surprise are not expected to resonate far and widely. Many acute trusts are neat;y placed near the centre of busy towns and cities.

You may remember my previous exclusive about the £8 million sale of the Information Centre’s stake in Dr Foster Intelligence to Health Secretary Andrew Lansley on 9 July.

I got this story not through genius, contacts or bribery, but by reading a long annual report. So it goes.

Always read all the way to the back
Like a fool, I still fail to heed my own advice on health policy documents: always read the bit at the back, thoroughly.

When is abolishing NHS Direct not abolishing NHS Direct?

When it's just changing the phone number.

No, it's not very funny, is it? But then Andrew Lansley aspires to be seen more as a liberator than a stand-up comedian.

Lansley has replied to shadow health secretary and Labour leadership contender Andy Burnham, who wrote to Lansley accusing him of yesterday in the Commons misrepresenting Burnham's 2009 statement when Health Secretary.

BBC News seem to be first with this.

The DH statement says the following:

A Department of Health review of the National Programme for IT has concluded that a centralised, national approach is no longer required, and that a more locally-led plural system of procurement should operate, whilst continuing with national applications already procured.

Today’s Independent leaks Deputy PM Nick Clegg’s speech today to the Institute For Government, in which the Lib Dems’ romantic lead is to promise to give ministers “time to develop”.

Don’t you love reporting on the future? It’s like doing the horoscope.

The future of management in the NHS isn't what it used to be.

For many clinicians, this will be seen as a good thing. For many clinicians, managers are target-obsessed, financial-balance-driven surrender monkeys to the tin Gods of the SHA and the DH, or Monitor.

There remains a degree of mutual antipathy between 'the two cultures', best encapsulated by sad remarks from various parties that managers and clinicians are taught to hate one another in training. The truth is more nuanced than that, but in general not much more.

Irwin Brown of the Socialist Health Association looks at Transforming Community Services (a.k.a. Turkeys' Christmas Solidarity)

There is a deadline of April 2011 for all PCTs to have divested themselves of their provider functions. All or part of them can transfer to a foundation trust (FT) or to a local authority, on a short-term or permanent basis.