Ending GP Catchment Areas

Health Secretary Andy Burnham has announced his intention to end catchment areas of GP surgeries which restrict which surgeries you can sign up to. Part of the argument is competition which is supposed to drive up standards as people don't register at poor surgeries and part of it is to provide flexibility for people who might want to register, for instance, near their work or their child's school. It sounds OK and it might be the right thing to do but what really troubled me was the man's statement; "In this day and age I can see no reason why patients should not be able to choose the GP practice they want". The man said publically that he can see no reason not to change it. Well, since he is apparently not very clever, I will provide some, partly courtesy of people on the news article:
1) What happens with home visits if you are registered 40 miles away?
2) What happens when loads of people register near work? The local surgery might be left with stay-at-home patients with potentially a high percentage of ongoing and serious conditions to have to deal with.
3) Most council services work by areas, this might make accountability difficult.
4) If lots of healthier people decide to register elsewhere, it can cause a snowball effect because a struggling surgery now ends up with a disproportionate number of sick people who visit often and who are then even less able to deal with the work since they will get less money for their less patients but most of whom are now sickly.
5) There is no objective evidence that this technique, like schools and hospitals, actually drives up standards. The system is far more complex than that and it can be argued that the problem is related to the community being served rather than any serious incompetence on the part of doctors.
6) What happens if a surgery is oversubscribed because it is good and local people cannot register there and are forced to register far from where they live? This has already happened with NHS dentists and it was obvious there that this 'demand' did not suddenly force lots of other dentists to set up shop or to increase their staffing levels since as stated above, this is not a simple thing to do. The wage levels, general availability of qualified people and the simple practicalities of the work are big obstacles.
7) There is actually a danger that spare demand in an area is met with a practice that sets up to meet that demand with no track record in high-quality care and who might unecessarily put another practice out of business as people move to the new surgery.

There you go Andy, hopefully these few reasons why you might not want to end post code catchment areas will help you at your next meeting into the matter. I wouldn't want to think you go in uninformed and make a massive expensive cock-up on behalf of the tax-payers!