Thursday, June 12, 2008

And they call this "joined up government"?

There seems to be a bit of a rumpus brewing over the creation of "polyclinics" with the BMA (did you or I vote for the BMA?) saying they are bad and the government saying they are good.

Polyclinics are "super-surgeries" which provide GP services and more besides such as minor operations, nursing care and testing.

The government accuse the BMA of scaremongering and resisting change.

Really?

Polyclinic is just a fancy post-modern name for what we used to call a "cottage hospital". Which just proves that this is not a new idea. Cottage hospitals have been around for a long long time and generally came about as a result of a local people identifying a local need and then doing something about it.

What is new is that the government on one hand are shutting down cottage hospitals where local people want to keep them and opening up "polyclinics" where the government want to put them. What are we to make of a government which pursues a policy of closing down a "polyclinic" with one hand while opening a new one with the other?

Wasteful? Pointless? Profligate? All this and more. What is certain is that for all the talk of "joined up government" they really don't know what they are doing.

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