NHS: Losing out on choice agenda

The scale of the government's ambition to increase patient "choice" in the NHS has been underlined by new research.

A paper published in the British Medical Journal on Friday found that Britain lags behind other countries in offering alternative treatments.

The Department of Health is committed to extending choice to taxpayers as means of driving up standards and making the NHS more user-orientated.

But countries such as the US, Australia and New Zealand are already far ahead, according to the researchers from the Commonwealth Fund of New York.

The study of nearly 9,000 health service users found that the UK performed worse than all four other countries in offering to information about medicines, sharing decision-making, providing patient access to medical records and preventive advice and allowing self-management of chronic disease.

Commenting on the findings Angela Coulter, of the Picker Institute Europe in Oxford, and Deborah Rozansky, director of strategy at the Health Foundation, said ministers need to do more to "empower" patients if their targets set out in this week's public health white paper are to be met.

"Promoting involvement, empowerment and a sense of ownership of their health care could be the best way to ensure that people adopt healthier lifestyles," they said.

"For public health policy to be realised, paternalism must be replaced by active encouragement of patients to participate in their own care."

And they claimed that the new contract for GPs set to come into force in January was not geared towards encouraging choice.

"Once again there seems to have been a failure to join up the separate strands of health policy," they warned.

"The NHS should be supporting the public health push towards full engagement not working against it."