In January 2019, Doctors in Unite issued proposals relating to public health and primary care. This document has now been revised.
In the light of COVID-19 the authors believe that if these proposals had been implemented before the pandemic struck then the UK would have been able to respond much more quickly to the need and would have been in a much stronger position to plan and deploy local responses.
The government has allocated significant resources into protecting the front line of the NHS at the level of hospital services, with particular investment in the building of Nightingale hospitals. However, it has put almost no additional resources into primary care or community services to deal with COVID-19.
We believe that strengthening primary care and community services as laid out in our paper would mitigate the effects of COVID-19 for five main reasons:
1. Those working in primary care should look after populations and communities as well as individuals and their families. Dual training and accreditation for GPs and nurses in public health and primary care is essential. Neighbourhood public health leads would co-ordinate appropriate local responses to a pandemic, for example, by supporting people at home with COVID-19, isolating them and contact tracing in ethnically and culturally appropriate ways.
2. Primary Care Networks of GP practices should be funded to provide care home and appropriate domiciliary care during the pandemic. Community organisations should be integrated with primary care, which during the COVID-19 lockdown could deliver food, medicines and other essential items as well as provide support for isolation, loneliness and respond to mental health issues.
3. We support a social prescribing model, which in normal times encourages patients to go out, meet people, socialise and stay active; during a pandemic this is necessarily amended, and patients are asked to stay in and not meet people, but to still socialise, keep in touch with others and remain active.
4. We develop the idea of local democracy through Neighbourhood Health Committees which would organise appropriate medical, psychological and social care, led by public health leads working seamlessly with directors of public health who have authority and independence which has been devolved from central control.
5. We propose professionally independent public health advocacy so that the people can trust the advice and information they receive.
Doctors in Unite 