Medical Centre

A new study from Imperial College London reports that alternative providers of primary care in the NHS, including private sector companies, do not perform as well as traditional GP practices when their performance is assessed using a range of measures of quality of care. Alternative providers have been contracted to offer primary care in the NHS since 2004 under reforms designed to increase competition. These providers performed worse than traditional GP practices on 15 out of 17 indicators after adjusting for the characteristics of the practices and the populations they serve.The study was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine . "This study provides data to inform the debate about the growing role of the private sector in the NHS," said Dr Christopher Millett, lead author of the study, from the School of Public Health at Imperial. "New providers were allowed into the primary care market to stimulate competition, but our findings suggest that the

The likely effects of the Conservatives' and Labour's pledges to improve access to primary care are unclear. Both main parties have promised large increases in the number of GPs and significant improvements in access to appointments. In an article published in the the British Medical Journal , Thomas Cowling and Matthew Harris and myself - from the Department of Primary Care and Public Health at Imperial College London - say the pledges are unlikely to be achieved within a single parliamentary term. The Labour Party have pledged to recruit 8,000 new GPs and plan to reintroduce their guarantee of an appointment within 48 hours. This target was far from being achieved under the last Labour government, with only 81 per cent of patients able to see a GP within two weekdays in 2009-10. As well as recruiting 5,000 extra GPs, the Conservatives have promised that if they are re-elected, patients in England will be able to see a GP between 8am and 8pm, seven days a week. This policy