Family Practitioner Committees and their customers

This paper illustrates some of the ways in which the Family Practitioner Committee will have to change in order to being about their transformation from the ‘passive paying agency’ into the ‘active manager of customer interests’ when the proposals from the recent White Paper, ‘Working for Patients’, became law. We were asked to examine what was happening in the area of ‘consumer relations’ within the National Health Service by the Department of Health. Part of this work has involved our surveying all of the Family Practitioner Committees in England and Wales. This paper presents the results of our survey, examining some of the pioneering work carried out by a handful of FPCs to enhance consumer relations and highlighting the enormous amount of work that has yet to be done to ensure that providers and financiers really know what customers want from their local Health Service. All 98 FPCs were written to for information about customer relations’ initiatives and 60 replies were received. Of these only nine FPCs had carried out work in the area of customer relations, ten planned to do so and one had work in progress. The number of active FPCs varied notably by region. There was evidence of more work being done in the northern part of the country than in the south. The responses indicated that very little work was being undertaken to test the quality of the service provided by contractors (e.g. GPs) to FPCs. Most of the work was either a public relations exercise or surveys of accessibility. The results appeared to have little or no impact upon the policy of the FPCs. If FPCs are to become active managers of primary care services, radical changes in their practices with regard to customer relations are essential and long overdue.