David,Indeed you've struck the nail on the head. I worked in education in various support staff roles over a thirty year period. As Vice President of the support staff trade union branch for many of those years I watched scheme after scheme introduced, discredited, found faulty at audit etc. What is the REAL result of all this self congratulatory back slapping?Of course performance needs monitoring, but to what end.I was accused of insinuating that GPs were lining their pockets (which I didn't) and yet this very league table INSINUATES that my GP and her practice are failing. Not in my case. Many of my years in education were spent on technical monitoring of processes. Get the monitoring and maintenance wrong and the result is obvious for all to see. This kind of scientific monitoring, just as with actual medical tests, provides vital and irrefutable results. Performance indicators of staff performance in my experience are far from as cut and dried. It depends on so many factors that are often beyond the staff being monitored. Anyone taking such surveys at face value is an idiot. They require careful analysis in the context that they were made.My experience of such surveys leads me to believe that any survey that provides a performance curve such as could be drawn from this table is basically flawed? That aside publishing such a survey as has been done here can only falsely promote the idea that some GP's and their practices are perfect, which I strongly doubt, and others are verging on incompetent, which I'm sure is equally untrue.The concept of points for services provided smacks of the hotel star rating. How much does the fact that a hotel has a gym, a swimming pool, a trouser press, internet connection etc. etc. really add to whether or not it is actually a pleasant and comfortable place to spend a night? You mentioned “luck” in my case. Sure I was lucky. But by GP was thorough in her diagnosis to the point that my condition was established. She spoke directly to the medical team at WM and they were expecting me and “on the case” as soon as I arrived. Diagnosis is a fundamental skill in any fault finding, technical or medical. You can have a workshop full of tools or a surgery full of equipment and a schedule of special clinics as long as your arm (loads of bonus points there no doubt) but without correct diagnosis you might as well have none of that.My concern, as with the stated concern of some of the GP’s, is that this is entirely misleading. As you point out the links to detailed analysis is layers deep and even then viewed by the uniformed in isolation is pretty meaningless. Without informed analysis and comment on the table it’s publication trivialises a complex subject to the level of a football league table. I stand by my statement “Gutter Press”
Geoff Brown ● 7244d