Practice Update following latest NHS developments

Posted on September 6th, 2024

Dear Patients,

I am writing to inform you of recent developments within the NHS that directly affect general practice. As you may be aware, GP partners and contractors across England recently participated in a ballot conducted by the British Medical Association (BMA), where an overwhelming 98.3% voted in favor of collective action. This decision comes in response to the ongoing challenges in general practice, including the need for a new contract that better supports investment, workforce needs, and ultimately, patient care.

Starting from August 1, 2024, GP partners and contractors have been urged by the BMA to implement a series of actions designed to put pressure on the Government. These actions include, but are not limited to:

Limiting daily patient contacts per clinician to the UEMO recommended maximum of 25. Once capacity is reached, patients will be directed to local urgent care settings.
Offering face-to-face consultations wherever possible, as this is considered beneficial for both patients and clinicians.
Ceasing participation in the e-Referral Advice & Guidance pathway, unless it is clinically beneficial.
Stopping voluntary services that plug local commissioning gaps, ensuring that resources are focused on our core responsibilities.
Avoiding rationing of referrals, investigations, and admissions; patients will be referred for specialist care as clinically appropriate.
Switching off GP Connect Update Record functionality, which allows third-party providers to enter coding into the GP clinical record. This decision is particularly significant as GP Connect, a service that started operating in March 2024, is not yet fully rolled out but is intended to facilitate information sharing between healthcare settings.

Hartland Way Surgery has been proactive in adhering to BMA guidance for some time. Specifically, we have implemented a policy of limiting patient contacts (booked appointments) to 25 per day per clinician. Limiting patient contacts is essential to delivering safe and effective care. This measure ensures that our GPs can maintain the high standards of care that our patients expect and deserve. We will continue to uphold this policy moving forward and we will keep addressing patient queries as much as possible. Should we reach our daily capacity, we will keep doing our utmost to assist patients and direct them to alternative care options if needed.

The second action we have taken following advice from our Local Medical Committee (LMC), is to switch off GP Connect functionality for the time being. Although GP Connect implementation only started in March 2024 and it is not fully completed, this is a great tool as allows third parties to add information to the GP patient record improving workload management in the long term. This functionality is currently only being used for the Pharmacy First Service which means that details of the consultations in pharmacies are added directly to patient records. We wanted to assure you that switching this functionality off will certainly not affect patient care as a copy of the consultation will be sent by email and the added on patient records by our staff members.

We will continue to investigate and refer patients for specialist care as we feel is clinically appropriate without rationing.

We want to reassure our patients that we are committed to ensuring that patient care is not compromised during this period. We believe that these actions will contribute to making our NHS better for the future, and we hope that you can support us in this effort.

Kind regards,

The Practice Manager

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