The Doctor Association UK’s (DAUK) letter setting out priorities for the new health secretary has made headlines in healthcare publications.
GP Online and Pulse have both reported on our call for Yvette Cooper and Prime Minister Andy Burnham to make five commitments to healthcare.
Pulse highlighted our call for the new Government to ‘properly fund general practice to provide timely access, continuity and safe clinical decision making’.
Read the Pulse article in full.
Access requirements
GP Online, meanwhile, highlighted our call to ‘pause unfunded or unsafe access requirements until they have been independently safety tested and properly resourced’.
Read the GP Online article in full.
DAUK wrote to Cooper earlier this week to welcome her to the role and set out five priorities for healthcare.
Five commitments
- End the medical training bottleneck. Publish specialty by specialty training numbers, fund a credible expansion to meet medical school output and NHS need, and guarantee fair progression for doctors already serving the NHS, including SAS doctors and locally employed doctors.
- Guarantee doctor-led assessment where it matters most. Set national standards so that patients urgently referred by a GP, and patients with undifferentiated symptoms in hospital, are assessed by a doctor or have discharge approved by one. Non-doctor roles should complement doctors, never replace medical assessment.
- Rebuild the family doctor model. Properly fund general practice to provide timely access, continuity and safe clinical decision making. Pause unfunded or unsafe access requirements until they have been independently safety tested and properly resourced.
- Restore fair and independent medical regulation. Remove the GMC’s separate power to appeal decisions of its own tribunal, protect the independence of the MPTS and ensure independent oversight sits with the Professional Standards Authority. A regulator cannot credibly be investigator, prosecutor and appellant.
- Treat the climate and nature crisis as an urgent health crisis, ensuring health infrastructure is adapted to be safe in extreme heat by introducing enforceable maximum safe temperatures for healthcare facilities, delivering a public awareness campaign on the relationship between climate change and health, and supporting an accelerated program of decarbonisation and nature restoration for health.
Dr Matt Kneale, DAUK co-chair, said: “These are practical, deliverable reforms that would improve patient safety, retain skilled clinicians and demonstrate that the Government is listening to those delivering care every day.
“We would welcome an early meeting with you and your team to discuss how frontline clinicians can help shape and deliver this programme.”
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