CHANGES to healthcare touted as the biggest – and most controversial – in the 65-year history of the NHS are now in place.
On Monday GP-led clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) took over the purse strings and will now decide how to provide services you receive at your clinic, hospital, or within the community.
East Surrey CCG is now responsible for 169,000 people across Tandridge and most of Reigate and Banstead, including Horley, Reigate and Redhill, with a budget of £188 million.
Chairman Dr Joe McGilligan, a GP at Greystone House surgery in Station Road, Redhill, told the Mirror the new system would improve on primary care trusts by having health commissioners at the front line of care.
He said: "We have a direct link to the patient so we have immediate feedback as to whether it is working or not. Every act a GP does – prescribing, referring – is a commissioning act; this is just making them accountable for it."
Dr McGilligan admitted that not all doctors backed the reforms – although all have taken the obligatory step to join a CCG. He said: "You will always get some people who get it and some people who don't. Some people don't really understand it.
"I am clear this is the right way forward. We have a cradle-to-grave responsibility and we have to be at the forefront. You will always get some people who don't like change."
He played down a key fear that the reforms threaten to commercialise the NHS, as private companies tender for services from which they will make a profit, saying: "There isn't privatisation. The NHS is made up of lots of different things.
"GPs are all private providers sub-contracted into the NHS. It doesn't matter who provides a service, as long as the quality is there. You call it surplus in the NHS, you call it profit in private companies.
"The NHS is a badge of quality. It is free at the point of delivery, and that won't change."
A key theme for the East Surrey CCG is preventing illness. A new computer system, which weighs up factors such as medication, recent hospital admissions and blood pressure, will warn GPs which patients are most at risk.
Another drive is smoothing the "pathway" of care by providing an overseeing role to GPs, but Dr McGilligan said workloads would not increase significantly.
He gave the example of a stroke patient, who is first treated in hospital before being transferred to community care.
He said: "We need to get the patient journey right, not compartmentalise it. It is all very clunky, we want to make it as smooth as possible. Only one person will have responsibility for the whole pathway."
Patients are urged to put forward their views at their GP practice's patient participation group.
