The Department of Health has angered senior figures in primary care by appointing external consultants McKinsey to advise a panel of experts on how to measure GP quality.

Some of the 20 members of the well respected clinical advisory group set up to advise on aspects of Lord Darzi’s primary and community care strategy are unhappy that the DH hired McKinsey & Company to come up with ideas, rather than consulting panel members first.

HSJ understands members were due to meet with DH officials this week after asking the department to outline how much money it had spent on the consultants.

No members would speak about the committee’s work on the record, but one said the decision to use consultants had caused “frustration” in the context of the clinical leadership debate.

Sour note

“If you’ve got well known primary care academics already doing a huge amount of work in a particular area, why not ask them? Rather than paying out hundreds of thousands of pounds, why not ask the talent you’ve got?” they said.

Another spoke of being “taken aback” as McKinsey staff arrived at a meeting at the end of last year to present their ideas.

They said committee members had left the meeting “on a sour note”, adding some of the clinical measures proposed were “not as well thought out as the quality and outcomes framework” and others were “rudimentary and not specific to general practice”.

The member said: “Why were they brought in in the first place? Why wasn’t the expertise round the table used?”

Another senior figure close to the process said the unhappiness related to the wider issue of using consultants to develop ways of measuring quality “without necessarily involving clinicians in the early stage”.

HSJ has been told McKinsey was asked to put together proposals to use existing primary care data to help PCTs analyse the quality of primary care.

A DH spokesman said McKinsey was appointed after a competitive tender: “The application has benefited considerably from [the panel and clinicians’] expert input.”

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