If there is one thing that QOF has taught us it is that most GPs respond to a challenge. In the first year the government was surpised at the levels of achievement seen, although this was largely a repeat of the situation with Item of Service payments in the 1992 contract. GPs it seem, will do what is required to meet the contract.
We may have met our match, however. When the requirement is largely that you are not a GP but a large corporation it is an impossible target to meet. With hundreds of individual and different contracts it also become impossible to collect consistent statistics and monitor the performance of the corporate clinics - just when we seemed to be getting started on that problem.
We have seen this already with independent treatment centres. For years there was a persistent rumour of poor outcomes from these centres but no good figures to back these rumours up. There is some data now which suggests that there is little difference in outcome from NHS centres but nobody benefited from a five year delay in collecting the statistics.
We risk a distraction of GPs from the patient sitting in front of them and their needs by the central declaration of needs and solutions from central government. Anything else is a risk to the patients in primary care. This is why I support the Support Your Surgery campain.
