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Hello and welcome to Coffee House Shots. Today is the 14th of October. I'm James Seif and I'm joined by

Isabel Hardman. Isabel, what the government wants us to be talking about today is its push to get

GPs back to face-to-face appointments. You're currently writing a biography on the NHS.

How important is it that GPs see patients face to face?

And what does this say about the relationship between GPs and the government? We've had Sada Javid

pull out at very late notice from speaking to the GPs conference this morning. Are we heading back

to a kind of Fatscher era situation of tensions between the government and doctors,

or think of Jeremy Hunt and the junior doctor's strike,

or Andrew Lanzi and NHS professionals turning against his proposed reforms?

Are we in for that kind of spat over the winter, or is this all more of a storm in a teacup?

I think that the way that doctors' bodies are responding to these latest instructions

from Sajid Javed and from the sort of noises that the government has been making for quite a while

about face-to-face consultations suggests that they are up for a fight and they are very

offended and hurt, I think, by some of the claims that are being made by the government.

It's always the case that doctors do not like being told what they should be doing by politicians

because they see politicians as being unqualified and generally

sort of using the NHS as a political football rather than serious about patient care.

Now obviously they've often rebelled against things that they've turned out to then cherish

in later years in the NHS, including the creation of the NHS itself.

But this war of words at the moment

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