In this month’s BJGP two of the most senior doctors in the UK look ahead at the next 5 years. In her editorial with Laura Shallcross, Professor Dame Sally Davies, the Chief Medical Officer, reflects on the potentially dire consequences of the continuing over-prescribing of antibiotics and the inexorable rise in antimicrobial resistance. The Department of Health has now developed a 5-year antimicrobial resistance strategy, and a new TARGET antibiotic toolkit is available for use by primary healthcare teams, containing material for patients. Later in this issue Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, the Medical Director of the NHS, and colleagues, highlight the Department of Health’s Five Year Forward View, reflecting an emerging health policy sympathetic to the idea that general practice is central to the survival of an affordable and effective health service, and promises greater investment and stabilisation of current funding structures to achieve this. The article amounts to a clear statement of the need for further, careful change, accompanied by a call for substantially increased investment in the NHS in the years ahead.
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