Funding to hire GPs under the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) will become available from October.
The Government announced last week that the ARRS will be expanded to include GPs, an ’emergency measure’ intended to allow practices to hire 1,000 more newly-qualified GPs this year.
This expansion is backed by ring-fenced funding of £82m, and NHS England has since confirmed that PCNs ‘will be able to draw down’ this money from October 2024.
In the meantime, NHSE will ‘consult’ with the BMA’s GP Committee England to determine the ‘exact criteria for employing GPs’ for the revised Network DES specification.
Part of this criteria will include ‘ensuring that the GPs employed are in addition to the existing GP workforce employed by practices’.
In its letter to English GP practices and PCNs on Friday, NHS England stated that the additional funding will be available for the employment of GPs ‘who have recently obtained their certificate of completion of training (CCT)’.
This will take place via the existing ARRS portal to ‘allow for the quickest operationalisation’ of the expansion by using a ‘familiar reimbursement mechanism’ for PCNs.
The letter continued: ‘This move has been made to expedite the employment of some newly qualified GPs, who may be struggling to secure a practice role. We recognise the ARRS has not previously been used to fund GP employment.
‘We will engage with the profession and stakeholders to review this approach as we look to identify longer-term solutions to GP employment and general practice sustainability – including core GP capacity – as part of the future contract reform discussions.’
It also explained that the £82m is ‘ring-fenced’ for GPs in order to ‘ensure that the reimbursement of existing ARRS staff is not impacted by the introduction of GPs’.
NHS England indicated the ‘future budget setting’ will take into consideration this expansion, as it is a change to GP ‘operating costs’.
On nurses, who can currently only be recruited in ‘enhanced roles’, the letter said: ‘We also recognise that there have been calls for the scheme to be expanded to include practice nurses.
‘While our current focus is to respond to the immediate issue of GP unemployment among newly qualified GPs, we and Government will keep the scheme under review.’
Pulse Writing Competition 2024
Fancy yourself as the next Pulse blogger? Enter our writing competition now!
Who wants to be employed by a PCN for 6 months?
If on the consultant pay scale (with similar T&C’s) it’ll be a game changer and will send a clear message on how well the new government values GPs.
‘for the employment of GPs who have recently obtained their certificate of completion of training (CCT)’
Is that not age discrimination by NHSE??
Agree with Anonymous -but the answer is PCN CDs and PCNs want PCN GP ARRs (degrading in my opinion even to have to write this term) to be employed so they profit from the misfortune of others – no PCN CDs and no PCNs equals a better future for newly qualified GPs and a better future for all of Primary Care
Employ ARRS GP, sit back, feet up, count the money.
Ker-chingg!