Clinics a first step to private care

Margaret Hathaway, project director, SE Essex Primary Care Trust, fails to answer the concerns of GPs about superclinics and the plans to hand over NHS GP services to private companies (July 9). In dealing with Leigh Primary Care Centre, she points out patients are now seeing their GP in a bright modern environment, which all will agree is good. Apart from carrying out minor procedures, no additional services are being offered at the centre. When she says that patients will not have to travel miles to see their GP there, she fails to mention that patients living in the Burnham Road area will now have to travel further to visit health professionals previously housed at the Burnham Centre. While Ms Hathaway makes great play of the fact that no GP will be forced to move into superclinics, Dr Nicholls, of the Jones Family Practice, points out that those GPs who refuse to move there will be at a disadvantage in relation to GPs based there. This brings me to the main point of my letter (July 7) which Ms Hathaway choose not to answer, namely that superclinics are the road to privatisation of NHS GP surgeries. The PCT has just awarded a contract to run the new GP surgery on the University of Essex’s Southend site to a private company rather than inviting GPs to apply to run it or employing a salaried GP. Haringey PCT, riding roughshod over the wishes of people living there, is planning to axe 45 out of 60 surgeries and will no doubt in time award the contract to run the superclinics it plans to build to a big private company. Andrew Meldrum, chairman of the British Medical Association, said earlier this month: “Let’s stop pretending that healing the sick is like trading a commodity. “Let’s stop diverting doctors’ energies into unholy bidding wars for jobs they already do. “Let’s follow the Celtic lead and get rid of the market in healthcare once and for all.”