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Baroness Williams and her colleagues are right to ensure that the NHS
fundamental values are upheld during the transit of this bill through
parliament. However, the currrent contribution of some politicians,
professional bodies and the media may leave doctors believing that the
bill is limited to the creation of some form of health marketplace. This
is simply not the case if the bill is taken as a whole.
The central plank of this bill is the replacement of the current
administrative commissioners with the clinical commissioning groups of
health professionals. However a lesser reported reform will demand that
strategies for the commissioning and provision of local health services
are created by local doctors with local public health professionals and
local councillors. These documents will give clinicians and councillors
the powers to protect and improve local NHS services and doctors should
ensure that they engage early and provide strong local leadership to
deliver clinically excellent plans.
This is how frontline doctors can build the future NHS from the grass
roots up and we can escape from the top down past. We must simply trust
ourselves to create the right future.
Creating the map to the undiscovered country
Baroness Williams and her colleagues are right to ensure that the NHS
fundamental values are upheld during the transit of this bill through
parliament. However, the currrent contribution of some politicians,
professional bodies and the media may leave doctors believing that the
bill is limited to the creation of some form of health marketplace. This
is simply not the case if the bill is taken as a whole.
The central plank of this bill is the replacement of the current
administrative commissioners with the clinical commissioning groups of
health professionals. However a lesser reported reform will demand that
strategies for the commissioning and provision of local health services
are created by local doctors with local public health professionals and
local councillors. These documents will give clinicians and councillors
the powers to protect and improve local NHS services and doctors should
ensure that they engage early and provide strong local leadership to
deliver clinically excellent plans.
This is how frontline doctors can build the future NHS from the grass
roots up and we can escape from the top down past. We must simply trust
ourselves to create the right future.
Competing interests: No competing interests