Professor Steve Thomas:

Political leadership from the likes of the Deputy would be very important. We have done considerable work on task shifting, with an emphasis on looking at workforce planning, not just in the silos of our professions, but in the whole primary and community care team. Who can do what? What kind of task-shifting do we need? What kind of oversight do we need in order that the tasks GPs do not need to do can be given to public health nurses and the tasks public health nurses do not need to do can be given to some kind of medical assistant or something such as that? Integrated workforce planning, which came up earlier, is incredibly important. Technical discussions have to happen in that regard, but there are quite a few political issues involved because the roles of different healthcare professions will change. That is in a slightly different domain when it comes to the politics involved and power of different professions.