Is it a GP practice, is it a shop? No it's a super-surgery - the answer to patients' prayers (possibly) but not necessarily good news for doctors.

A month after HSJ wrote about it, The Times reported on the trial scheme launched by Heart of Birmingham primary care trust that will see GPs move into newly built 'super-surgeries' with extended opening hours and offering a wider range of health services.

Doctors will have to reapply for their jobs to be part of the 'Tesco-style franchises' reported the paper. Its editorial was cautiously optimistic about the idea.

But The Times's own medic-columnist Thomas Stuttaford was sceptical. The plan 'seems to disregard the importance that patients and their doctors give to the doctor-patient relationship', he wrote.

Meanwhile, hospital grub came in for another drubbing. 'Hospital food is so bad that 20 per cent of the staff would be unhappy to eat it and one in four patients ask relatives to bring in meals,' revealed The Observer, one of many papers to pick up on new research by consumer organisation Which?. It quoted Patients Association vice-chair Michael Summers, who said: 'Cutbacks by hospitals have had a terrible effect.'

And finally, The Guardian raised questions about the quality of some information leaflets in GP surgeries, which can be put out by commercial organisations or carry extensive advertising from big brands.

But it is not just leaflets that may need vetting, suggests a snippet in the Daily Express. Apparently, a surgery in Suffolk was forced to take down a picture of a nude woman because it raised male patients' blood pressure. Dr Louise Skioldebrand is quoted: 'One of the more risque pictures of a well-endowed woman was hung above the blood pressure machine, which we decided was probably not the best place for it.'