GPC report 20 Feb 2014

GPC Report

For East and West Sussex LMCs

Dr Russell Brown

20 February 2014

The GPC held its first meeting of the year today. 

The meeting in January was an "extra" with external speakers to help stimulate debate and thus assist with strategy formation for the longer term. Held under Chatham House rules, there is little to report directly, but it was useful in my view.

This month's meeting was back to the usual format, though was shortened by subcommittee meetings in the afternoon.  The official GPC News 10 appears not to be on the BMA website as yet.  I will see if I can upload a copy to the blog entry for this report so constituents can see it if they wish. (Available here )

Negotiation report

Work continues on the implementation of the contract agreement for 2014/15.  Though confidential in the main, I was interested to note that negotiations and discussions are not following the traditional format.  I will say more on that if and when able but it is likely to be a positive step forward.  Guidance notes will be published in due course on the contract changes and  enhanced services.  The King's Fund published a paper called "Commissioning and funding general practice". It is an interesting perspective and I suggest you at least glance at it.  It can be found here

Future of general practice 

A motion was passed at the September meeting directing the negotiators and GPDF to work towards establishing a view of the the opinion of the profession. Work is ongoing and colleagues should expect a survey in due course, of all GPs.  It is likely to be a lengthy and detailed survey.  I have no more details at present.

Care.data

Tim Kelsey and two of his team visited GPC to answer questions.  This occurred the day before the announced pause and the week before the grilling by the Health Select Committee in Parliament. Colleagues will no doubt have seen the email from Chaand Nagpaul on is matter, so I will bore a you no further.  GPC is however continuing to apply significant and persistent pressure.

Funding redistribution

Area teams have two years to undertake reviews of PMS practices, with NHS England telling them that matters need to be sorted out locally. It is a right mess.  There are 35 practices I the LMC area (including Surrey) who will be affected by this.  As well as this, the MPIG transition process by NHS England has identified 98 practices who are outliers, using an arbitrary cut off of £3/patient/year.  I am very concerned that there will be other practices in Sussex who are not technically outliers who will nevertheless find it extremely difficult. Please contact the LMC office if you are concerned about the impact this may have on your practice. 

The afternoon session was taken up with subcommittee meetings.  Colleagues may recall I am the Deputy Chair of the Commissioning and Services Development subcommittee.  Much of this meeting was taken up with discussions based around the King's Fund document mentioned above.  Together with members of the negotiating team and Simon Poole, the Chairman of CSD, I will be meeting to further develop matters in a couple of weeks time.  Additionally Simon and I will be attended a meeting at the King's Fund on behalf of GPC/CSD on this matter.  We will endeavour to ensure your interests are represented, given all the other non-elected and non-representative "stakeholders" who tend to be at these things.

The next meeting is to be held on 20 March 2014.  I hope you have found this report helpful.  Please feedback so that I can ensure my reports are useful. 

Dr Russell Brown