Quite a lot of my day-to-day work with the NHS now centres on the ways in which NHS services need to be reconstructed to increase the capacity of patients to add much more value to their own health care. Last week I argued that the primary provider of most NHS healthcare was not the GP nor the GP practice nurse, nor even the community pharmacist, but was rather the patient and their family carer – who primarily cared for themselves.
GPs in the room responded with interest to this challenge. Indeed one community pharmacist pointed out that the failure to realise the importance of patients as primary carers means that a high percentage of drugs prescribed never actually get into the patient. If we better appreciated that patients need some training in what is going on when they are prescribed medication, a larger proportion of the billions that we waste putting drugs into bathroom cabinets (rather than into people) would be saved.
