Named consultant for hospital patients will end culture of “brief encounters,” says England’s health secretary

Hospital patients should each have a “whole stay doctor” assigned to them who would be accountable for their care throughout their stay and who made sure that they were handed over to a named GP after discharge, England’s health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has said.

In a speech at St Thomas’ Hospital in London on 23 January, Hunt said that the NHS needed new models of care to tackle the “fragmentation of care experienced by patients in hospitals.” More generalist doctors needed to be trained in the place of specialists, he said.

Hunt said that his vision of whole stay doctors, named consultants, and named GPs “transcends the walls of a hospital—with names above beds inside hospitals as the starting point.”

New models of care were needed to reduce the number of …