and social care professionals can work together Improved care for patients with chronic or complex conditions A shift in the focus of urgent care out of hospitals and into polyclinics. A report by the King's Fund has questioned many of these, observing that: Access to services was likely to be harder in rural areas and in urban areas where new buildings were not situated close to transport hubs Simply putting healthcare professionals in the same location is in practice often not sufficient to generate co-working or integration of care While the co-location of multiple services presents opportunities for delivering more integrated care, particularly for people with chronic diseases, the evidence suggests that in practice these opportunities are often lost, and accessibility of primary care is likely to be reduced for most patients if their GPs move into polyclinics, particularly in rural settings (a point emphasised in The Times) There is limited evidence that quality of care for services shifted out of hospitals is comparable, and there is evidence that quality may be decreased in certain cases; the limited inspection and accreditation of out-of-hospital care is also a serious deficit in quality assurance The report also observed that the proposals were likely to increase professional isolation, and threaten both professional development and motivation, and continuity of care, and that pre-existing problems in healthcare to do with the lack of an overall governance structure, and unclear lines of accountability had not been addressed. It concluded that while polyclinics offered real opportunities for some health communities to establish more integrated, patient-focused care, these would only be realised with considerable investment of time, effort and resources into their planning and development, and that the primary focus should be on developing new pathways, technologies and ways of working rather than new buildings. The Conservative Party leader David Cameron did not object in principle to the case for polyclinics but is worried that they might be imposed against the wishes of communities. He suggested that close to 1,600 GP surgeries may have to close across the country as a whole if polyclinics were established in the way the government is suggesting. The Health Minister Ben Bradshaw, however, denied that individual GP practices would be closed as patients would remain registered with their existing GPs. These figures have also been dismissed by Dr Laurence Buckman, chair of the British Medical Association's General Practitioners Committee. Funding It was