Even when the Government claims to be ’empowering patients’ it manages to do it in a Whitehall-centric way.

The only ‘new’ initiative to make it into the media in yesterday’s white paper on public services –  “Working Together” (see previous blog) – was the supposedly novel idea of allowing patients to ‘rate’ their local doctors on-line – like Amazon’s book and seller rating systems. Whatever you think of the idea – and it has plenty of critics – Whitehall as usual implements it as if they were the only people in the world. Someone else is already doing it… see the story in today’s Financial Times:

“Millions of pounds of government investment in an NHS Choices website was criticised on Tuesday [by Prof. Colin Tabot] for threatening to stifle independent services that appear to do a better job at less cost.

Patients are to be allowed to post comments about their GP surgeries on the NHS Choices website later this year as the government adds online reviews of council and childcare services to the existing ability to review and rate hospitals on NHS Choices.”

for full story see Financial Times ‘NHS Website spending attacked‘ by Nick Timmins

see also letter in today’s Guardian.