ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the challenges facing general practice (GP) in a political context. It shows that how the values that inform New Labour’s programme of modernisation compare with the traditional values of general practice. The values of New Labour challenge the traditional values of the GP. New Labour is intent on controlling medical practice from within professional groups themselves by implementing a new culture of clinical governance. To gain some sense of the possible impact of modernisation on doctors as a profession, it is worth considering a parallel with the teaching profession. The theme of modernisation is being powerfully played out across a range of different areas of life, of which primary healthcare. The ethic of ‘modernisation’ calls for a new professional identity, centred now not on the privilege of self-regulation, nor even on exclusive duties to individual patients, but on a wider set of covenant responsibilities and civic service.
