Nurses' clinics to compete with GPs' surgeries
Friday, 27 June 2008
Alamy
Lord Darzi's report says giving nurses the right to have their own 'businesses' will shake up GPs
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Nurses are to run their own "companies" inside the NHS to compete with traditional family doctor surgeries and provide more services to patients.
A long-awaited report by Lord Darzi, the Health minister, on Monday will propose that nurses create new organisations offering physiotherapy, health checks for illnesses such as diabetes, and immunisation programmes on the NHS.
They will be encouraged to be more entrepreneurial, to run their own social enterprises for the NHS and they could even employ doctors, turning the traditional model for a GP's surgery on its head. Ministers believe the competition from nurses will shake up family doctors who have become set in their ways.
Lord Darzi will announce that the nurses who leave local primary care trusts to run such social enterprises will be able to keep their NHS pensions. The issue of pensions has proved a sticking point.
The minister, a renowned surgeon, will say that for the first time, staff will be given a "right to request" that a nurse-led organisation be created. Primary care trusts which run local health services will be forced to consider the requests. If the PCT agrees it would improve care, a new independent NHS organisation would be established to provide services to patients, under contract to the PCT, using NHS resources. Gordon Brown used details from the Darzi report to launch a fight-back against the barrage of criticism that is expected to mark his first anniversary in office today.
With Labour trailing David Cameron's Tory party in the opinion polls by more than 20 points, Mr Brown signalled he intends to regain the initiative by laying out more details for "personalised" services in health, social care, and policing.
Traditional family doctors are against the most controversial part of the Darzi plan, the creation of 150 new multi-GP health centres in England, offering 8am to 8pm opening hours with no need for patients to register. A protest petition signed by more than a million patients opposing the plans was delivered to Downing Street by the British Medical Association. The Tories are claiming the new health centres could lead to 1,700 traditional family doctor surgeries being forced to close.
Health ministers have told Mr Brown he can take on the BMA and the Tories and defeat them.
