BBC News | HEALTH | Blair backs high street healthcare

Prime minister Tony Blair has announced a �30m plan to bring walk-in health clinics to the high street.

Mr Blair told the first ever conference on primary care groups (PCGs) in Birmingham on Tuesday that 20 pilot walk-in clinics are to be established in England.

He also announced plans to develop further NHS Direct, which provides the public with telephone access to advice from health professionals.

These include the creation of a network of public computer terminals giving online access to a new Electronic Library for Health.

The walk-in clinics will be staffed by nurses and run by GPs, and are aimed at giving patients faster, more convenient access to medical advice and to treatment for some minor ailments.

The clinics will be open from 7am to 10pm.

They will be located in libraries, pharmacies or even in supermarkets.

The �30m to be made available this year will come from the NHS Modernisation Fund announced last year.

The government plans to spend �280m over three years to promote the walk-in centres and further development of NHS Direct.

Better access

Mr Blair told the conference: "With 24 hour banking, shopping and TV now part of our way of life, we need to think of new ways of responding to patients' needs.

"We need to offer a new option for people who perhaps, because of their hours or their job location find it difficult to use existing services."

Mr Blair said a busy working woman, juggling home and work responsibilities, needed flexible and fast access to health advice - a service that traditional primary care found difficult to provide.

"We need an NHS moulded to the needs of people, not the other way round," he said.

Mr Blair said the new centres would complement the existing GP service, and would relieve pressure on hard pressed family doctors, allowing them more time to see patients who needed their service.

Dr Simon Fradd warned GPs are under intense pressure
Dr Simon Fradd, chairman of the Doctor Patient Partnership and deputy chairman of the British Medical Association's GP committee, welcomed the fact that more resources were being pumped into primary care.

However, he warned that GPs were still under intense pressure to cope with increasing public demand for healthcare, and that the new centres could exacerbate the problem.

Dr Fradd said: "We have the lowest number of doctors in Europe per head of population - that is the fundamental problem.

"This could potentially make matters worse by drawing people away from the family doctor service into this new service."

Claire Rayner of the Patients' Association said the walk-in clinics were a gimmick.

She would prefer to see the money going into the new primary care groups so that GPs could have more time to see patients.

She is worried that having more than one family doctor could reduce overall quality of treatment and supervision patients receive.

NHS Direct expanded

The government plans to extend NHS Direct to cover the whole country by the end of the year 2000. Currently the phone line covers 40% of the population - 19m people.

As well as the creation of an online arm, proposals include:

Referral of callers directly to an out-of-hours doctor, social services or mental health staff
NHS Direct nurses to proactively call people who need help or advice
A network of NHS Direct information points in surgeries, libraries, pharmacies, post offices and A&E departments
An NHS Direct healthcare guide to be sent out to callers
Training for the public on basic healthcare issues

Mr Blair said NHS Direct had proved very popular with patients.

"The service is giving people the confidence to look after themselves where they can and directing them to the appropriate service where they need professional care," he said.

Shadow Health Secretary Ann Widdecombe said: "These centres will be valuable to many people whose jobs may prevent them from visiting a doctor during regular surgery hours.

"However, patients need to be reassured that they will receive the same standard of care from doctors at these drop-in centres as they do with their own GPs."

She added: "Family doctors have already raised concerns about the quality of service provided by NHS Direct - both types of service suffer from the problem that patients do not receive continuing care in the way they would from a doctor who knows them."


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