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How will the NHS shake up affect people with epilepsy?
The Government is planning the most radical reform of the NHS in decades, saying it wants to put patients and professionals at the heart of the service and make health outcomes the best in the world, but what will this mean for people with epilepsy?
The Government says that patients will be offered more choice over how and where they are treated, practice boundaries will be scrapped enabling people to register with any GP they choose, and more and better information will be available to the general public via Healthwatch, a new patient body that will collate information on performance and feedback from patients themselves.
‘No decision about me, without me’ will be at the core of new shared decision making, it says.
Under the new blueprint announced by health secretary Andrew Lansley, the NHS will be ‘set free from political meddling’. GPs will be handed much of the multi-million pound budget currently managed by Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) which are to be abolished along with strategic health authorities. Consortia of GPs in England will be directly responsible for commissioning the majority of NHS services, with specialist commissioning being carried out by a new board.
Mr Lansley said that the new structure would ‘put patients right at the heart of decisions made about their care and place clinicians in the driving seat on decisions about services.’ Funding would be switched from bureaucracy to frontline services as the NHS looks to make savings of £20bn by 2014.
But while chief medical officer at the National Society for Epilepsy (NSE) Professor John Duncan cautiously welcomed the move to put outcomes for patients at the centre and drive improvements at the frontline, he also expressed fears about upheaval in the NHS when it is already under pressure to become more efficient.
"While at first sight the NHS reforms seem good news, there are concerns," he said. "GPs are already busy and most cannot take on budgetary management as well. They will need to hire business managers – perhaps the same people who now do this for the PCTs - so money may not be saved. And the worry is that GPs may not have the time or money to refer people for specialist (tertiary) care such as at the National Hospital for Neurology and Neurosurgery or NSE’s Chalfont Centre, which in terms of patient outcomes is actually the place where most people get best seizure control."
