Doctors must find reality to be just so damned annoying

We would not say that everything is perfect in the National Health Service, in fact far from it. Nor would we insist that the current arrangements for general practice are quite what they could or ought to be. But we would still insist that reality has to have a look in here.

GPs are fed up with responding to political whim; they want to provide care to patients which is based on evidence, not political expediency.

That's from the following gentleman who has just surveyed all GPs in the South West:

John Campbell is professor of general practice and primary care, University of Exeter Medical School

As we say, we really do insist upon that intrusion of reality.

The entirety of the National Health Service is paid for from tax revenue. That means that GPs in the NHS are paid for with tax revenue - your wages come from our pockets but through the filter of politics and politicians. Therefore, and this is inevitable, there is no way to avoid this, how those tax revenues are spent, what the NHS and GPs are told to do, will be determined by politics and politicians.

The only way out of this is for the NHS not to be tax funded and thus not under the control of the politicians. For that's actually what we elect politicians to do - oversee the spending of our tax money.

You may not like this but it simply is never going to happen that an organisation gets £120 billion a year of tax money without politicians directing how it is spent because that's what politics is for.