Choice is often touted as a panacea. If you give people the power to choose you make them responsible for their own destiny rather than treating them like commodities on a conveyor belt.
But what use is having an array of options if you don’t understand the consequences of your selection? Healthcare, and the bureaucracy that shapes it, changes swiftly and it takes an astute, almost abnormally interested individual to keep track of the various bodies operating in one’s local NHS, let alone at national level. There are primary care trusts, hospital trusts, community trusts, foundation trusts – and most recently, “super surgeries”, or polyclinics, which are being built in certain areas to give patients far greater access to healthcare services.
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