A new form of stimulator?

While reading one of the GP rags we noticed a very small article about the development of a Practice Based Commissioning (PBC) simulator. Now some of us here on Northernshire enjoy using flight simulators to help maintain and hone certain skills (mostly long distance navigational ones) and there are even simulators that enable you to design and fly aircraft which have been used to develop real aircraft which got us thinking about what (flight?) model this PBC simulator would use.

After a hard symposium of work at the Café Michelle on the “model” we present an artistic summary of our thoughts above.

No doubt desperate and incapable NHS managers will see the word “simulator” and think that a “simulator” will do a "Jim’ll Fix It for them" and be booking in droves seminars for them and local GPs hoping that something that sounds like a “flight simulator” will encourage their ideas to fly above the plummeting failure that is called PBC.

Some quotes from a more detailed article:

“The Practice Based Commissioning Simulator has been developed in conjunction with the primary care body the NHS Alliance and Swedish-based BTS, a provider of customised business simulations.”

Who?

“Humana Europe said the PBC Simulator combines hand-on learning, including role play and business simulation, with predictive technology in which the conditions and variables of PBC are replicated through a computer simulation.”

Most of our medical students are so peed off with role play that this is a guarenteed turnoff with doctors to start with. They like to see and help REAL PATIENTS and despise role play which is in contrast to managers who constantly pretend they are doing something useful on a daily basis.

“The company, a subsidiary of the American health benefits giant Humana Inc, said the simulator was designed to inspire primary care clinicians and practice managers to improve health and cost outcomes through advanced PBC techniques.”

See above image. Which is the more inspiring? What are “advanced” PBC techniques and do they work any better than the failed “basic” techniques?

“Dr Peter Reader, head of the PBC programme at Humana Europe, said the simulator was designed with the particular skill sets of GPs and practice managers in mind. He added: “Over the course of the simulator programme participants get to see the impact and outcomes of the decisions they make whilst building a greater understanding of the implications that practice based commissioning has on improving health outcomes.”

We are out to make a fast buck out of the suckers using this pile of horse manure.

“By using the resources available to them wisely GPs can empower their patients to live healthily and reduce their susceptibility to disease and in turn ensure that services reach those people with real need.”

Hmmm. So if I spend 4 hours on a simulator we will stop our patients smoking, using heroin, getting fatter and drinking themselves to death? And we still can’t get an urgent MRI scan for a patient with a life threatening condition despite PBC?

“Dr Michael Dixon, chair of the NHS Alliance and a Devon GP, said the onus was increasingly on GPs and practice managers to commission services in an intelligent way to meet the health needs of their patients.”

We could do that but the power is with the idiots called commisioners, sorry World Class idiots, that you are clearly pimping this “simulator” to?

Praise be to the Party who continue to flog a long dead horse in the hope it might get up and win the Grand National for them. The horse is dead let us hope no other fools attempt to revive it in the near future.