A report by the think tank has warned that ‘PBC is clearly not operating effectively'.
It calls on the government to devolve real budgets for commissioning-specific services to GPs and PBC clusters. Responsibility for strategic population-wide services such as public health would remain at PCT level.
National Association of Primary Care (NAPC) president Dr James Kingsland backed the recommendations.
He added that they reflected how PBC was originally meant to work: ‘The King's Fund is re-iterating an idea Tony Blair had 7 years ago.'
The researchers found that PBC had little impact on services. Instead its most visible impacts had been in improving - or destroying - relationships between GPs and PCTs.
The report identifies a number of reasons for this failure, including GPs' lack of free time, poor quality of data, and the DoH's failure to explain how the policy worked and what it should achieve.
The failure to align power with financial responsibility or tackle conflicts of interest had also proved to be blocks.
- Editors' Blog - PBC must not end up on the scrapheap
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