ARRS roles should be supported and not seen as burden

Additional roles reimbursement scheme (ARRS) staff should be supported and not seen as a burden, according to primary care leaders.

Speaking at a Westminster Health Forum event this morning, joint clinical director at Wallington PCN and physician associate (PA) lead at Sutton PCNs in South West London, Eunice Ashley, called for more support for ARRS roles within primary care.

‘For the ARRS roles there needs to be a bit more put into their career development frameworks, their toolkits, understanding supervision, and a perception of not being seen as such a burden or a problem,’ she said.

‘That creates issues in itself with feeling comfortable and confident to address their colleagues or to discuss things with them.’

She also addressed PAs specifically, adding that there could be a greater assurance about the quality of training programmes for them.

‘Hopefully, with the recent move by the GMC having started regulating us since Friday, this will now come into play,’ she said. 

Ms Ashley, who clarified she is not employed through the ARRS scheme and has been in her current practice since 2013, added that morale is currently ‘very low’ among PAs.

‘There have been redundancies, there have been empty clinics, I would say that this hasn’t just had an impact on practices, it also has affected the culture of the organisations they work for,’ she said.

‘There’s a wider impact on other staff members, clinical and non-clinical in terms of how roles can be moved or changed and the views of them can change when they’ve worked in a practice for quite some time.’

She said there should be greater support provided to general practice to implement and facilitate the working of all the ARRS roles, not just PAs.

‘The complexity of the receptionist, the administrator, the care coordinator, should not be underestimated,’ she added. ‘It’s incredibly valuable and they often have amazing insight to our service users, the ones who don’t make it into our doors – what they are thinking and experiencing.’

Professor Aruna Garcea, chair of the primary care network advisory group at NHS Confederation, also spoke of the ARRS roles at the conference and echoed calls for the roles to be better supported.

‘We need to make them supported; we need to give them the capabilities to do their work properly and confidently,’ she said.

‘We’ve heard about some of the challenges of capability and ARRS roles,’ she added. ‘I’m not sure this is something we need to throw away, I think this is about understanding what we need to learn and modify in the NHS, rather than throwing baby and bathwater out.’

RCGP chair Professor Kamila Hawthorne also revealed during the session that over 300 GP roles have now been filled through the ARRS scheme since October.