Seminar Briefing

A number of important themes emerged, as well as some signals as to the leadership development needs of those charged with ensuring PCGs’ success.

They challenges they face are to:

• International and UK experience illustrates the difficulty of involving the publica in health caare priority setting in ways that enable politicians, managers and doctors to incorporate public preferences into practical decision making.
• Many techniques for measuring public preferences fail to incorporate key concepts:

• opportunity cost. What are people prepared to give up or have less of, in order to have more of something else? The public have to be asked to make trade-offs;

• The integration of health care is the defining theme of policy developments in the UK, US and New Zealand. The common element between the three countries has been the development of multipractice and multi-professional groups in primary care settings.

• International learning has become commonplace and has accelerated the introduction of innovations in the UK.