The survey is dead. Long live...ummm....not sure really

Up and down the country there was almost unanimous joy in GP land at the announcement of Andrew Lansley to deliver a death blow to the highly controversial and widely hated patient survey. I for one have many concerns with it's accuracy and find that it was by far a perfect tool by which to judge GPs. It is easy to dismiss the survey as non representative and claim that it is not a true marker of patient satisfaction however one has to admit that as yardsticks go the national GP patient survey gave us a strong indication of our strengths, weaknesses and a general overview of how we compared to the rest.

It's all good and well claiming that the survey stresses to much on access but can we really claim that it hasn't made us all think a bit more about appointments, waiting times at the practice, striking a better balance between same day and advance appointments? If we look at some of the proposals being put forward to replace the survey we can clearly see they are just as liable in presenting an inaccurate view of our practices, such as the call to reinstate local health watch committees or local based surveys.

Instead of doing away with the survey why did we not try and fix it, we all know about the problems raised regarding small sample sizes, disregarding ethnicity in weighting the results despite this being a major factor as shown by credible research published by the BMJ. My concern is that we risk throwing out the good with the bad instead of assessing each thing on it's merit.