Professor Jones believes that the White Paper ignores the ‘funding crisis'.1 Nothing could be further from the truth. The White Paper proposes that GP consortia will hold a budget for purchasing care for the population covered by the consortia. If a consortium fails to meet its responsibility to break even, its commissioning responsibilities will be taken over by the NHS Commissioning Board or assigned to a third party. This provides a powerful incentive to focus on the cost of services being provided or purchased. GPs are responsible for the vast majority of decisions relating to this expenditure, and they will now be directly accountable for these decisions.
The White Paper, therefore, proposes a powerful incentive to manage financial costs that has not existed since GP fundholding. The level of funding required to deliver a service with high quality outcomes can only be addressed once the incentives to achieve the desired outcomes are in place. The case that funding from general taxation is both fair and efficient has been comprehensively made by Wanless.2 This is and still should be the policy of the Royal College of General Practitioners.
- © British Journal of General Practice, 2010.
