If Only Patients Were Apples

On telly the other evening was an article about how farmers are able to deliver "fresh" apples to us all year round. The answer is that they store apples in reduced-oxygen cooled storage units. Similar things are done with the humble potato. The way in which Tesco et al monitor the growing, storage and packing of everyday food items is astonishing. Consider the following the next time you are holding a bag of spuds in the supermarket.

Mr Sainsbury or Mr Morrison can tell you everything there is to know the batch of potatoes in that bag:

• What day it was originally planted and the weather conditions (wind, temp, etc)
• What chemicals have been applied to it (batch number, date, weather conditions, etc)
• What day it was picked (weather, blah, blah ..)
  
• Where it was stored and all the records of temperature, location, etc.
• When it was removed from store and packed
• Which lorry delivered to where and then the same for final delivery.

It is an amazing system and it hasn't cost twenty billion quid!

Bad, like Tesco?

I attended a presentation yesterday about "Practice-based Commissioning". If you don't understand the term, may I suggest you click the "Next Blog" link at the top of the page? It would take too long ...

Anyway, one of the speakers was a passionate GP who explained what he and his colleagues were doing to ensure that the big, bad, Tesco/Boots/Sainsburys axis of evil didn't invade primary care. Why is this so bad?

Well, conventional GP thinking runs alongs the lines: They will open early and late so they will deal with our least-troublesome patients: the young, working people who don't want to take time off work to sort out their minor ailments. Under the present system of funding, we receive annually an equal amount of money for each patient. It doesn't matter what age they are, or how often they use our services. Since children and the elderly use us most, the loss of our least demanding patients mean we will find it hard to fund the same levels of care for these more vulnerable groups. GPs throughout the country are busy defending the status quo. I help ours to do so.

But before signing up to the received wisdom of the evil of Tesco et al, I think we all need to ask ourselves a number of questions about these companies and the services they provide:

1. Would you like your local McDonalds to be as clean as your local hospital?
2. Would you like to wait as long at the checkout as you do at your local GP?
3. Where do you buy fuel for your car and why?
4. Who deals better with complaints; Sainsbury or the NHS?
5. How much does it cost to park at your local supermarket and at your local hospital?
   

If you think I am being unfair, you are probably reciting a long list of the fundamental differences between a retail operation and a hospital. I don't see that cleanliness, punctuality, effective demand management, customer service and smart procurement should form part of that list.