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The personal medical services (PMS) pilot scheme in the British NHS has been in existence for over two years and was designed to allow experimental schemes to test alternative models for delivering primary and community care.1 So far the scheme has proved popular, but three new factors make it important to review the future of the scheme and its direction: the New NHS white paper2; the very popularity of the scheme; and the impact of the “NHS plan.”3 Because British general practitioners have traditionally been self employed, the contract under which they perform work for the NHS (the general medical services (GMS) arrangements set out in the “red book”) is elaborate and is perceived as being inflexible and bureaucratic. The personal medical services scheme allowed participants to test contractual mechanisms that would have been illegal under the normal arrangements. Although the personal medical services scheme has sometimes been called the “salaried doctors” scheme (to contrast with the normal self employment arrangements), this has not been its defining characteristic. Rather, the …
Jonathan Shapiro (Sat,) studied this question.