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GP practices with the most outdated technology do not have enough staff or funding to take part in NHS England’s recovery programme, integrated care boards are warning.
In new primary care recovery plans, multiple ICBs said that stretched capacity means hardly any practices have signed up for the “general practice improvement programme”.
The programme is meant to help practices implement the NHSE’s primary care access recovery plan – particularly to adopt “modern” tools such as digital phone systems, and online messaging and triage. It offers “three tiers”: a three-month “intermediate” programme, a six-month “intensive” offer and an online-only programme open to all practices.
However, ICBs pointed out that the programme is time-consuming, particularly for the “intensive” and “intermediate” tiers, which are likely to be required by practices most in need of help. Practices that take part are not always given funding to pay for staff time, they added.
Many ICBs also said they had struggled to establish more “self-referral routes”, which they are meant to establish to “cut bureaucracy” for GPs by allowing and encouraging patients to access secondary care without accessing a GP first.
Workforce shortages – particularly in fully qualified GPs – posed the biggest risk to primary care recovery, according to many ICBs, with numbers having dropped since 2019.
Leached and lost
Bill Shields, who is chief finance officer and interim chief executive officer of Devon ICS, said the patient choice regime – in which the health service pays for patients to be treated at private hospitals – was costing around £8m a year.
At the same event, ex-health secretary Patricia Hewitt said it made “perfect sense” to use all available capacity, although the Norfolk and Waveney ICS boss was concerned this stopped funding being shifted elsewhere.
There is little prospect of any change to the policy, which has been in place in varying forms since 2005. But Mr Shields said: “I’m still not entirely clear why as a system in [the successor regime to special measures] we wouldn’t suspend choice.”
Unsurprisingly, the claim was given short shrift by the Independent Healthcare Provider Network, which said the choice had a “demonstrable impact on improving patient access to NHS care”.
While Mr Shields is one of the first to express this concern publicly, some finance directors worry privately that the growth in NHS-commissioned independent sector activity – which is far outstripping internal health service capacity – is diverting resources elsewhere and undermining recovery efforts.
Also on hsj.co.uk today
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