Funding to hire GPs via the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) ‘will continue beyond March’ next year, the health secretary has confirmed.
Speaking at the RCGP conference earlier today, Wes Streeting was asked to give newly qualified GPs ‘reassurance’ about ‘secure employment’.
He told audience members that the extra £82m released to hire 1,000 recently qualified GPs via the ARRS will continue into the next financial year, in order to provide ‘certainty and stability’.
The expansion of the ARRS, announced on the eve of GP collective action over the summer, was introduced by Mr Streeting as an ‘emergency measure’ to tackle GP unemployment.
However, full details of the scheme were not shared until last week when the updated PCN DES revealed that only GPs who qualified in the last two years will be eligible.
Earlier this week, the RCGP wrote to NHS England calling for a ‘public commitment’ to ‘identify funding for future years’ and also for the money to ‘become part of the core contract’.
Despite the emphasis on this being an ‘emergency measure’, Mr Streeting has now committed to further funding beyond 2024/25 – but stopped short of confirming that this will be core contract funding.
In a question to the health secretary about the future of the scheme, RCGP chair Professor Kamila Hawthorne highlighted that many GPs are ‘pretty worried that they may have to uproot their lives for a job that may not exist beyond March’.
Mr Streeting said in response: ‘So two things – firstly the funding will continue beyond March. And I think that’s the kind of certainty and stability that people need now both in terms of employing people but also taking up jobs.
‘And the second thing, which also kind of relates to the wider challenge that underpins the threat of collective action – we’re really committed to walking the talk on the left shift, and growing the proportion of the NHS budget that goes into primary care generally, general practice specifically.’
Although the health secretary hinted that general practice may see funding increases, he warned that this would not be immediate.
He said: ‘I think the one thing I kind of need to add particularly as a cautionary note ahead of the Budget and the Spending Review, is we do need time.
‘I can’t turn around 14 years of underinvestment in a single Budget or even a single Spending Review. But we can start to move in the right direction and try and make things work as well as we can as we make improvements. But it’s a marathon, not a sprint.’
The health secretary has also said he will ‘revisit’ the NHS long-term workforce plan in order to shift more focus onto GPs and primary care.
Professor Hawthorne highlighted that although the plan promises to increase GP training places by 50% by 2031, the underlying modelling shows that the number of fully qualified GPs will increase by only 4% by 2037, compared to a 49% growth in hospital consultants.
Mr Streeting said the Government has previously said they will ‘maintain’ the workforce plan and ‘for the moment it remains business as usual’.
However, he continued: ‘As part of the 10-year planning process, I think we will have to revisit some of those core assumptions in the long-term workforce plan, because I think you are right to draw that contrast in terms of size of growth in hospitals versus size of growth in primary care, not least given the Darzi diagnosis.
‘I think the Darzi diagnosis necessarily leads us to a different prescription on the long-term workforce plan.’
Last month, the Darzi review found that spending in primary care has a ‘superior return on investment when compared with acute hospital services’ and as such, it ‘makes sense that this should be the fundamental strategic shift that the NHS aspires to make’.
Creates a de facto ST4 year. Practices will employ any new salaried GP on a year (2 max) long contract and keep rotating them to take advantage of the ARRS funding.
The abuse of ARR roles and newly qualified GPs by PCNs is continuing unabated as they are being forced to undertake the roles felt to be most undesirable for PCN leaders or GP partners in my view.
In some areas they are being recruited specifically to the more unwelcome roles e.g. out of hours where the GP partners /PCN leads receive double funding i.e. both for PCN extended hours which may be £160 to £170 per hour (estimated) and then another £80 per hour (estimated) for the ARR GP .
Hence potentially PCNs are being paid up to £300 per hour (minus some relatively minor utility and staffing costs ) and the newly qualified GP receives around £80.
This does not account for any income generated by the said newly qualified doctor in the session.
The PCN and PCN CD exploitation of newly qualified staff and staff endures in my opinion and is historically the worst abuse of funding for profit ever seen within the NHS in my opinion.
Last sentence corrected;
The PCN and PCN CD exploitation of newly qualified staff and ARR staff endures in my opinion and is historically the worst abuse of funding for profit ever seen within the NHS in my opinion
Apparently he didn’t know there might be an issue with how the funding for the GPs he announced a few months back would be implemented by NHSE. Something tells me this guy doesn’t control what happens in our health service. Someone else is does. They aren’t elected and they aren’t medical. NHSE is evil