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Family Doctor Services

Of course I can. Two central fallacies underpin the Tory party position. The first is that we are imposing a system of polyclinics throughout the country. We are not. The second is that, if an area has a group practice or a health centre, or if GPs decide to move into much better facilities where several practices operate together, people can no longer see their own GP. That is nonsense. It is wrong to suggest that the proposals signal the death of the important patient-GP relationship; they do not. Individual, single-handed GP practices will continue to operate where they are right for patients. When we talk about developing health centres, or what some local parts of the health service describe as polyclinics, we are not considering a single, fixed model of care. Those terms describe flexible models for bringing primary care together with a range of other services, be they diagnostic services, specialist care for patients with long-term conditions such as diabetes, or adult social care. It is hardly a novel idea. Health centres featured in the earliest descriptions of the national health service in 1948. Examples abound of GPs, nurses, specialists and other health care professionals coming together to provide integrated care for patients. With advances in new technology and medical science, we can and should do that to a greater extent in much more imaginative ways. We are also guilty as charged of expanding access both through the new health centres and the new arrangements that we are introducing for extending opening times at GP surgeries in the evenings and on Saturday mornings. The Conservative party appears to have adopted wholesale the distorted view expressed in some quarters of the BMA and articulated by the right hon. Member for Witney (Mr. Cameron), who believes that the cash-rich, time-poor professionals—I paraphrase from his speech on Monday—who need to get their back problem fixed, as well as some jabs for a business trip to India, will be the main beneficiaries. One has only to visit practices that are already open for longer in the evenings and weekends to find that it is not, as so often claimed, a service for the worried well. Those who are most likely to benefit from extended hours are manual workers worried about taking time off, parents balancing child care responsibilities, certain ethnic minorities who are most dissatisfied with current access arrangements, and those very pensioners and mothers with young children, who are said by opponents of extended hours to want only a Monday to Friday service, with a half day on Wednesday.