THE INFORMATION AVAILABLE ABOUT GPs
A huge amount of information about GPs is available now. It is not all of great quality, but it is serviceable, and it needs to be acknowledged, and acted upon. The information is both qualitative and quantitative and it partially measures our performance as GPs. Some of the information is held at the level of the local area1 by primary care trusts (and increasingly by commissioning consortia) and some is held by us within our practices. It needs to be brought together.
VARIATION
What we do know about UK GPs is that our performance is variable with a range from good to poor.2 We know that in the UK there are unmet health needs and wants. We also know that our systems are slow to change, and culture even slower.3
In a farsighted article Marshall described some major changes he anticipates coming to general practice in the next 30 years or so.4 He sees the role of the GP moving from its traditional focus on treating individual patients in our consulting rooms to our becoming much more explicitly accountable for our performance both in terms of its quality (patient perception and outcome measured) and its quantity (our commissioning role and use of resources). We will become as concerned with making the system work well as with actually being the product delivered by the system and this will mean making much use of our knowledge, and, as a profession, contributing much more actively …