Kings Medical Practice News www.kingmedicalpractice.co.uk

Lots of policy changes announced by the new government this week; scrapping of some key health targets, reduction in NHS management costs, GPs to be ‘lynch pins’ of NHS and some of these policy changes are having an impact locally. And there was the sport! Health Secretary Andrew Lansley has stated that "I want to free the NHS from bureaucracy and targets that have no clinical justification and move to an NHS which measures its performance on patient outcomes. Doctors will be free to focus on the outcomes that matter - providing quality patient care." Nationally it has been reported that the government is to scrap the 4 hour waiting target in A&E, the 18 week treatment target and the right to see a GP for a routine matter within 48 hours. But when you drill down a little bit into the detail then they are not actually scrapping the 4 hour wait target in A&E – just reducing the target from 98% to 95%. And announcing that the NHS locally can have more input in decidi

This is my first blog for nearly three weeks! Not because I have nothing new and original to say (?) but because I have been away on holiday. I have just spent two weeks in Italy, near Lucca. we had a great holiday and of course I followed the Slip, Slap, Slop message - 'slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen and slap on a hat'. The message has now been extended to 'Slip, Slop, Slap, Seek, Slide' - 'slip on a shirt, slop on sunscreen, slap on a hat, seek out some shade and slide on the sunshades!' The practice provides a full travel advice service to our patients including travel vaccinations, travel health advice (Slip, Slap, Slop), advice about malaria prophylaxis and Yellow Fever vaccination. Most travel vaccination are free - the exceptions are generally if you are going to unusual places or doing unusual e.g. back packing trips or staying somewhere for longer than three months. The commonest vaccinations patients have to pay for are Yellow Fever, Hepatitis B an

Script Switch is a prescribing tool that helps GPs make more cost effective prescribing choices. I does three things; firstly it alerts us to drugs that cheaper if prescribed by brand name, secondly it tells us about some preparations that are cheaper and thirdly it gives us what seems like random advice about some of the drugs we prescribe, In the past GPs have always been advised to prescribe drugs ‘generically’, that is by their chemical name, because generic drugs are usually cheaper and thus more cost effective. However, because of the way the NHS pays for drugs some branded drugs are actually cheaper than when they are prescribed generically. Examples of this include generic chloramphenicol eye ointment that we prescribe for conjunctivitis costs the NHS £2.07 whereas brand name chloramphenicol, Choloromycetin costs the NHS £1.08 – a cost saving of 99p per prescription. When you start looking at drugs that are often on repeats the savings getting bigger; the drug sulfasa