After years of studying General Practice, Ben Gowland has achieved something that has eluded many great scientists: he has found empirical evidence that parallel universes exist…

I have recently discovered evidence of a new universe, centred on Planet Alpha. Planet Alpha appears, to all intents and purposes, very much like our own planet. The inhabitants breathe an oxygen/nitrogen-mix, the humans are bi-pedal and no-one can fully explain the attractions of Donald Trump.

But Planet Alpha demonstrates some marked differences from Earth. It is overly endowed with policy wonks and Whitehall mandarins, a disproportionately large percentage of its movers and shakers have never held a real job and, tragically, many of its citizens suffer from selective deafness.

It is in Planet Alpha‘s approach to General Practice that we can really see the differences between them and the planet inhabited by you and me. On Planet Alpha the problems of General Practice are that it is not available 7 days a week, that not every GP surgery is offering Skype appointments and, therefore, not ‘embracing technology’, and that it is not uniformly operating at scale.

On Planet Alpha the push is to “modernise” General Practice using an army of robotic entrepreneurs with unlimited private equity that is hanging around just waiting to be invested in primary care. On Alpha there are huge efficiency savings to be made by using other professionals to support GPs and, ultimately, make them redundant. But, frustratingly for the policy-makers, many of the Alpharian GPs won’t get their acts together by offering more modern services such as 24/7 access to primary care through supermarket-like chains of super-practices stretching across the country.

Things are very different on Planet Beta (also known to scientists as Planet Reality). Beta is inhabited by GPs and practice managers with very different problems. On Beta demand has skyrocketed to unmanageable levels. Staff are leaving and there is nobody to replace them. Indemnity costs, regulation costs and locum costs are forever rising, while PMS reviews and the withdrawal of MPIG protection have stolen income away. Many staff on Planet Beta are at breaking point.

GPs on Beta know their premises are too small, are not DDA compliant and they constantly worry about the future. They look for the queue of investors waiting to sign cheques for them – but it never materialises. Increasingly sick and demanding patients arrive in their surgeries with sheets of conflicting information downloaded from the internet. The GPs want to make changes, but they don’t have time to meet the other GPs in their own practice, let alone anyone from the outside world.

Parallel universe Alpha is a much happier place because Health Ministers there are currently working to manufacture 5,000 new all-singing, all-dancing GPs to populate their alternate world and bring joy and relief to all concerned.

My research has left me reflecting; isn’t it a good job that parallel universes remain parallel and never intersect? Aren’t we lucky that the hard-pressed GPs on our own planet won’t ever have to meet the top-down loving, one-size fits all, single-minded-against-all-the-evidence autocrats on Planet Alpha? Wouldn’t it be truly awful if the Alpharians set the strategy and made the policy decisions for our own GPs to follow?