Health Hypermarkets Coming Soon

Healthcare for London today announced that 5 'polyclinics' will be opening in London by spring 2009. A polyclinic is a fancy name for a kind of health services hypermarket. Not only will they provide late night, weekend and emergency doctor's appointments; physiotherapy, CT scans, counselling and even advice on housing benefit and yoga class are amongst the complementary services that will be available too. As well as improving access to GPs it is hoped that the polyclinics will divert people away from unnecessary visits to A&E and keep minor surgical procedures out of hospital. The NHS is infamous for continually restructuring services and, inevitably, further pissing about with how local services are delivered is coming in for criticism but the under one roof concept sounds pretty smart to us and we can't wait to see the super surgeries in action.