BMJ 1996;312:1304 (18 May)

Letters

Scheme has been a disaster

EDITOR,--Stephen Gillam and colleagues' editorial on the recording of health promotion activity arrives at a broadly correct conclusion by a route that ignores the present political context of the discredited banding scheme in general practice.1 General practitioners began to see the need to offer health promotion to their patients during the 1980s, and some exciting developments followed, in the best tradition of general practice. Unfortunately, 1990 saw the introduction of the "10 patients per health promotion clinic scheme," which was superseded by the banding scheme--a bureaucratic exercise to collect data that has little scientific basis. The scheme recycles existing income for general practitioners in exchange for data of little value to those who amass them. Far worse, even enthusiastic general practitioners who are prepared to accept responsibility for a "population focus" to their clinical work see little benefit to their practice populations or, indeed, to individual patients resulting from their . . . [Full text of this article]


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Relevant Article

Health promotion in primary care
Stephen Gillam, Peter McCartney, and Margaret Thorogood
BMJ 1996 312: 324-325. [Extract] [Full Text]

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