There then followed a panel discussion, chaired by Charles Swainson, though by now the programme was running late and time was short, limiting the session to 5 minutes per panelist and a few questions from the floor.
Peter Lees thinks that we are missing a trick with patient liaison. Until recently it never occurred to him (or I suspect most of us) to actually ask his patients what they thought about him and his service. Rather bravely he has directly recently done just that with a few patients, and found the experience very rewarding. As a result he feels that if we could only ‘let our patients in’ in this way, they could be strong advocates for us.
Steve Evans took the managerial line humourously with a Goff cartoon of a manager telling his staff “I’ll be in charge of delegating all the blame”. He commented on growing perceptions of increasing managerialism in the health service and problems with the quality of middle management. He also felt that consideration of doctors as managers was misplaced—doctors are managers.
Sîan Griffiths lauded the Wanless reports and exhorted us to take up the public health agenda in our day to day work. The burden of preventable disease is growing such that healthcare will break unless we take this seriously. We all have responsibilities for this within our Trusts, with employees, with patients and as corporate citizens.
Ken Aswani reminded us that the PECs are the professional executive committees of primary care trusts (PCTs) which have responsibility for improving health, delivery of primary care as well as commissioning all healths services for its patients. The PECs thus give professional locally a prominent role and opportunity to shape tomorrow.
