BRITAIN: British prime minister Tony Blair conceded yesterday his government should set fewer targets for public services, including health and education.
His admission was made after he came under fire about a 48-hour appointment target for GP surgeries. Patients had complained this target led to clinics refusing to arrange appointments more than two days in advance.
Mr Blair faced anger during a live TV grilling yesterday when Diana Church, Epping, Essex, described how she had struggled to get an appointment for her son after his GP asked her to bring him back in a week's time.
The prime minister told the BBC: "I think that in the health service and in schools, targets are important, but there has been a danger, if I am frank about it, that they have been too crude.
"What we need to do is to keep them but make them sufficiently flexible and not to have so many of them that they overburden the system."
His comments came as health minister John Hutton defended NHS targets during a debate with opposition parties at the British Medical Association. Mr Hutton criticised Tory plans to scrap targets, saying: "I think it is right in principle for patients to have a set of minimum rights to treatment within the National Health Service."
Mr Blair admitted he was "astonished" to hear that the 48-hour maximum wait for an appointment was causing problems. But doctors' leaders and patients' rights campaigners said yesterday the target - which requires all patients to be seen by a GP within 48 hours - compromised services.
Dr Mayur Lakhani, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners, said it wanted a review of the targets, which had become "more important" than patient care. And the chairman of the British Medical Association's GP committee, Dr Hamish Meldrum, said: "We have always felt that this has been a crude target which has distorted priorities."
Ms Church said it had taken two hours on the phone to book an initial appointment at her local surgery for her son Gerard (10). When she saw the GP, he asked her to bring Gerard back for a check-up in a week's time. But the surgery refused to book an appointment for seven days ahead, telling her she must ring up again within 48 hours of the time she wanted to bring her son in.
The chief executive of Epping Forest Primary Care Trust, Aidan Thomas, said it was necessary for practices to "hold back" some appointment slots to meet the targets.
Health secretary John Reid said the introduction of the target had "transformed" the situation from the days when patients had to wait more than a week for an appointment. However, he acknowledged there were "wrinkles" in the system which needed to be sorted out.
But shadow health secretary Andrew Lansley and Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy accused Mr Blair of being out of touch.
Mr Blair told the BBC's political editor, Andrew Marr: "The purpose of having a target that people should see their GP quickly is that for years and years people weren't able to go and see their GP. Same with accident and emergency, where people used to wait for ages and ages. Same with waiting lists.
"Where I think we as a government, though, have got to respond is that targets are good, they are necessary to engineer change in public services, but they shouldn't become an end in themselves.
"Whereas at the beginning I think they were necessarily somewhat crude and blunt, I think over time we can make them more flexible and make them work in the right way for the people who've got to implement them as well as for the consumer of the service."
Mr Blair said it would not be right to scrap all targets, as the Tories suggested.