"My unscientific guess is that our crowd is 40 pct black now, still four to five times all other teams.
Milton Keynes health and social care services, a joint venture between the council and the local primary care trust (PCT), is one of 26 social enterprise pathfinder projects across England.
Involving people who have worked "on both sides of the fence" and those "with PCT experience" in the new commissioning structure will help commissioners do their job more effectively.
But David Moore, head of commissioning and care at the council, says: "Despite the integration we've achieved so far, the council and PCT are still separate organisations with different policies, procedures, finance, IT and human resources.
Practices will retain 70% of any savings (the PCT will keep the rest), provided that they are ploughed back into better services.One potential drawback is that GPs' revived role in purchasing may stymie competition in the primary care they provide.
Of this a quarter pays for the drugs GPs prescribe while the remainder goes towards the cost of acute care in hospital.The budget has been devolved to the GPs by the primary-care trust (PCT) in Sheffield, one of 152 which purchase most of the health care in England.
And my further guess is that 40 pct still feels like 70 pct to some whites at our games".
If former PCT managers end up running the new consortia, it is difficult to see where improvement will come from; and as for the involvement of private-sector companies in the commissioning business, PCTs have long been at liberty to seek their services.
This simplifies today's tedious process, where national and PCT versions of the same patent have to be written to different patent standards.
The budget controlled by the GPs should contribute half the savings the PCT is hoping to make in 2006-07.The consortoum to which the Avenue practice belongs is currently concentrating its efforts on reducing unnecessary referrals to hospitals.
