JANET DAVIES the Chief Executive and General Secretary of the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) has responded to the Labour Party call for a £500 million winter bailout fund for the NHS.
Davies said: ‘Any bailout money this winter should be used to bolster frontline staff and help ensure safe patient care. Having the right number of nurses is key to treating people effectively and safely. Yet too many hospitals are chronically short of nursing staff.
‘As demand increases over the winter months, it’s patients who will pay the price unless something is done. Properly funding the NHS is a political choice – it should not reach the stage where a last minute bailout is required to keep people safe.’
Dr Chaand Nagpaul, BMA council chair, said: ‘Last year NHS staff and patients endured the worst winter on record and right now we are sleepwalking into yet another crisis that has the potential to be worse than the last.
‘We’ve yet to hear of any concrete plans from the government on exactly how they plan to stop a repeat of last year and any new injection of cash and resources will of course help ease pressure during the winter.
‘Pressures that were previously only seen in winter are now stark year-round, with targets routinely missed, a lack of hospital beds and services, A&E departments struggling because of an overstretched system, and GPs increasingly unable to provide the high-quality, timely care they want to deliver for their patients.
‘While the government needs to urgently outline plans to support the NHS going into the winter period, the NHS also needs politicians of all parties to end the pattern of short-termism that plagues NHS policymaking.
‘Long term investment and workforce planning are urgently needed; especially as recent figures show that three in four medical specialties are facing a shortage of doctors. If spending on the NHS matched that of other leading EU countries, then patients would see £15 billion extra investment in the English NHS within five years.
‘This additional funding could be used to provide tens of thousands of extra hospital beds, recruit thousands more GPs and reverse the cuts made to the public health budget rather than slashing budgets further.
‘The NHS is at breaking point because, quite simply, investment isn’t keeping up with demand. We need the government to urgently look at the long-term funding, capacity and recruitment issues facing the health system as a whole if we are to get to grips with the pressures the NHS faces year in, year out.’
Meanwhile, A Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) has taken the decision to disperse patients to GP practices with long-term contracts rather than renewing three Alternative Provider Medical Services (APMS) contracts.
NHS Bradford City CCG said its decision, which will be implemented when the three contracts expire in March next year, was based on a patient consultation, which showed they preferred their GP services offered by a long-term provider with which they could find continuity of care.
The CCG is planning to offer the remaining 15 GP practices, a majority of which operate under PMS contracts, which are all within a one-mile radius, the opportunity to take on the patients.
A CCG bulletin said: ‘People who took part in the consultation said that they wanted to see the same GP team to increase their continuity of care and that changing the service provider every few years did not help with this.’
It said the decision was also ‘based on staff views and opinions, a review of the patient lists of each practice, the health needs of the local population, the geographic spread of patients within the area, and the condition and facilities available at each of the surgery buildings’.
The CCG said the decision would ‘see existing surgeries with long-term contracts taking on additional patients, improving their ability to recruit and retain key staff and enabling them to consider offering a broader range of services to the community’.
It added that the premises used by the three surgeries ‘will be available to existing practices to use, if they require, in order to expand the long-term capacity of practices in the area’.
NHS Bradford City CCG chief officer Helen Hirst said: ‘We think this is the best way forward for patients, who have told us quite clearly that they value continuity of care from the same group of doctors and staff.
‘Allowing existing, high-performing surgeries to take on more patients will make them more attractive to clinical staff seeking employment, helping them to recruit and retain the right people to ensure continuity of care.’
Asked whether the practices, which are all based in the Manningham area of Bradford, had the capacity to take on the added workload, the CCG said that all of the practices currently have open lists accepting new patients.
The news comes as NHS England’s national policy is to favour APMS contracts over General Medical Services (GMS) and Personal Medical Services (PMS) contracts, because they offer more ‘flexibility’.
This has prompted the BMA’s GP Committee to warn GPs not to hand back their contracts because it would throw them open to competitive tender and ‘privatisation’. A investigation recently revealed that not a single new GMS contract has been awarded by NHS England in five years.
During the same time period, just one PMS contract was issued, while the remaining 242 new contracts were time-limited APMS contracts. Asked to comment on NHS Bradford City CCG’s decision to focus on longer-term GP contracts instead, an NHS England spokesperson said: ‘NHS Bradford City CCG, as a CCG with fully delegated primary care commissioning responsibilities, has explored all the options available to them on the future of GP services in the Manningham area, with a decision based on robust engagement with patients, stakeholders and the local community, to provide continuity of high-quality GP services in the area.’
GPC contracts and regulations lead Dr Robert Morley said: ‘It is good news that the CCG is taking patients’ views on board. Patients want a traditional model of care rather than short-term commercial contracts.
‘It is a great pity that NHS England and the Government don’t see this. I hope they pay attention. Commercial general practice contracts have been an unmitigated disaster for GPs and patients since they were brought in.’
Local Care Direct, a provider holding one of the APMS contracts due to end, said: ‘It’s too early to say exactly how the closure will be implemented but we have asked for an urgent meeting with Bradford City CCG to discuss the implications of the decision.
‘We will be doing whatever we can to support patients and our fantastic practice team to get the best possible outcome.’