The Lowest Common Denominator - again!

There are good doctors and there are some that are not so good. A few are dreadful. Such things are inevitable when there are so many of them and none of them every get younger. GPs are not except from this. In fact, given that most of them run their own businesses (i.e. their practice) the opportunity for variation is all the bigger.

Enter the "primary care trust". The job of a PCT is to be the part of the NHS with responsibility for signing contracts with these GP practices to deliver the services that the NHS wants delivered. Our contract is three inches (7½ cms) thick.

If you suffer from insomnia, you might leaf through the odd tonne of gumph spouted by the NHS about " ... devolving power to ensure local services reflect local needs, blah, blah, blah ..." It seems such lofty aims stop at the PCT. They simply cannot cope with lots of practices each doing things in their own way, especially when some of them don't do it properly or well enough.
Their response to such variations?? Simple!

Make everyone do it the same way, irrespective of whether or not that is better or worse than what was going on before in the non-problem practices. In other words, find the lowest acceptable performance level that everybody can meet and then make all do it, irrespective of how well they were doing it already.