GPs to vote on partners providing ‘minimum’ number of sessions in Wales

Welsh GPs will vote on whether to ask for a change in regulations to ensure that GP partners who hold a GMS contract are ‘required’ to regularly provide clinical sessions in their practices.

Representatives from Wales’s LMCs will meet in Chester next month for their annual conference to discuss issues affecting general practice, including the future of GMS, funding and workload.

They will vote on a motion calling for all GP partners to undertake a ‘minimum’ number of clinical sessions in their practice annually, including face-to-face appointments, due to concerns around the number of GP practices in Wales with GMS contracts held by GPs ‘who perform no clinical sessions’ in those practices.

The motion also calls for health boards to ‘refrain’ from awarding multiple GMS contracts to individuals who are ‘unable’ to provide clinical care across all of their practices, and asks for a change in regulations to ensure that GP partners are required to regularly provide clinical sessions in their practices.

At the conference on 8 March, LMC leaders will also discuss recent Budget changes, including the rise in National Insurance contributions, and call on the Government to ‘find a solution’ to ‘fully’ mitigate this.

The conference agenda also includes a motion noting the ‘unprecedented’ pressure on primary care due to unresourced work fuelled by the ‘significant’ rise in demand for weight loss medications, and calling for a ‘properly funded’ national obesity service.

Welsh cabinet secretary for health and social care Jeremy Miles will also deliver a speech at the conference.

Other motions which will be discussed are:

• demanding a commitment to ‘substantial’ allocations of ring-fenced new monies to improve GP estates to ‘world-class facilities’
• asking that GPC Wales negotiates a new dispensing contract for GPs that ‘properly supports’ dispensing practices to deliver this service
• requesting NHS Wales to allow flexibility to pharmacies to substitute medication that is in short supply rather than constantly referring back to the prescriber
• calling for ‘appropriate’ investment in digital infrastructure to address inefficiencies, reduce administrative burden, and improve patient care
• calling for the implementation of a single electronic pathology and radiology requesting service accessible to both primary and secondary care clinicians

Chair of conference Dr Tim Davies said: ‘We fully appreciate the extraordinary pressures facing Welsh general practice, the conference needs to rise to these challenges by focusing on how it wishes to instruct GPCW to meet them with potential solutions, rather than focussing on the pressures themselves.’

Pulse has recently reported on concerns raised about a GP-led company running practices in Wales, which was forced to hand back several GMS contracts following controversies earlier this month.

Earlier this week, the Welsh Government said it will not increase the share of NHS funding spent on general practice until hospital waiting lists are ‘brought down’.