Every morning our practice waiting room is filled with patients attending for blood tests. Doctors and nurses draw the blood, receptionists prepare and check the forms, and a courier transports the specimens to the laboratory. The results reach our computer system within 24 hours, slotting automatically into the data fields on the patients' Quality and Outcomes Framework encounter screens. The system in turn is interrogated by the Exeter unit, our QOF points are recalculated, and the practice's financial position is fractionally adjusted. Most of the blood tests are done in accordance with centrally determined protocols, and to satisfy an agenda that has more to do with public health statistics than individual wellbeing. The patients will have only the vaguest idea of why they …
From General Practice to Primary Care: The Industrialisation of Family Medicine
Steve Iliffe
Oxford University Press
2008
PB
233
£24.95
978-0199214501