There were more questions because it makes things more complicated.
The eligibility for the participation the reimbursement for GPs; locums are to be converted into salaried GPs! Yep! You heard that right! There are so many questions that need to be answered! When politics get involved answers to certain questions aren’t there! What do these locums do if this is their preferred option!? Will they insist them to do so? They also need extra support to recruit GPs! There is an extra step for GPs to access the money. They don’t trust their GP partners and they want to check what’s going on before they continue with the GP Reimbursement Scheme! 1 in 7 practices roughly have more than 3,500 patients per GP in England. This obviously means that doctors are an insufficiency compared to other staff like nurses per se. It could mean that these GP practices are struggling and that they could be denied locum GPs, if that’s the case! Other healthcare professionals might overtake GPs, in fact, consultants are estimated to overtake GPs by numbers by 49% by 2036, its 12 times more! There an outnumbered of 3:1 in a 2021 data report.
Health Bill
After Wes Streeting resigns, what he proposed to put to action, culminated into the most recent Health Bill.
♧ The bill will abolish NHS England and pass its powers to the DHSC.
♧ It grants more powers to the secretary of state and the DHSC, enabling them to intervene in how trusts and ICBs are run – including firing staff and limiting spending.
♧ The bill will compel all parts of the NHS and social care, including GPs, to share patient data for the single patient record, and give the secretary of state the power to impose fines on those who fail to comply.
♧ All digital functions from NHS England, including data collection, analysis and publication and the NHS App, will transfer to the secretary of state, who will be able to delegate most of these functions to a public body.
♧ It abolishes national and local Healthwatch. The strategic functions of Healthwatch England will transfer to a new directorate for patient experience at the DHSC. Local Heatlhwatch functions will transfer to ICBs and local authorities, but there is little detail on how this will work in practice.
♧ It will reconfigure certain duties of ICBs to support them to become strategic commissioning – as part of this ICBs will take over full responsibility for commissioning primary care and some specialised services from NHS England rather than this being a ‘delegated’ function.
♧ It will remove the requirements for ICBs to have a board member who provides primary medical services in the area, as well as a member from local trusts and from local authorities. Instead, ICBs will be required to have board members nominated by each elected mayor in the area. The bill also allows the secretary of state to issue guidance in future on who should sit on ICB boards.
♧ The Health Services Safety Investigations Body (HSSIB) will be merged into the CQC, and the period in which the CQC can initiate proceedings against providers will increase from three to five years.
Single Patient Record –
The part of the bill that will have the biggest impact on general practice is the single patient record. GPs and all health and social care providers will be legally required to share their data for the record and will be fined if they fail to do so.
The plan is for all patients to have access to their record via the NHS App from 2028 and eventually be able to feed into the record itself. The government says this will give patients greater control over their health and care.
A fact sheet published by the DHSC to accompany the bill highlights that a public deliberation run by independent facilitators, which involved 2,000 people across England at the end of 2024, found that the majority of respondents were in favour of a single patient record and considered it to be ‘long overdue’.
However, GPs and others have expressed concerns about how a single patient record would work in practice, who will deliver it and how access will be controlled. The bill sets out the broad legal framework for introducing the record, but there will need to be new regulations to govern exactly how data sharing will work.
GPs are currently data controllers for the information they hold in their practice and, therefore liable for any breaches. It is not clear under the current proposed legislation whether that liability would remain for any data shared for the single patient record.
Source; Talking General Practice
https://open.spotify.com/episode/0miLkFxcHTO0KZCK6tSMaC?si=h8ZoXcdKQRy_qZkP7lBZfQ
https://www.gponline.com/does-new-health-bill-mean-gps/article/1958829
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