The loss of multidisciplinary primary healthcare teams is bad for patient care
BMJ 2013; 347 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.f5450 (Published 09 September 2013) Cite this as: BMJ 2013;347:f5450- Richard Watton, general practitioner, The White House Surgery, 1 Fairfax Rise, Sheffield S2 1SL, UK
- rjwatton{at}gmail.com
Practice based multidisciplinary primary healthcare teams are being dismantled and replaced with geographically based teams that do not contain general practitioners. Let our experience be a wake up call: there may be unintended consequences. Remember out of hours care? No one intended to make this worse, but a shambles was created simply by taking frontline responsibility from general practitioners.
Thirty years ago we had a social worker, health visitor, physiotherapist, community psychiatric nurse, midwife, and a small team of district nurses all attached to the practice. We were a working team.1 2 We discussed patients informally every day, and we met formally once a week.
We have lost these workers one by one. The social worker was removed when social workers ceased to be generic. She was replaced with a flow diagram showing us how effective the lines of communication would be between us and social services. That was the start of our interaction with …
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