Friday 18 September 2015

Notes from RCGP Council Meeting 18 September 2015

#OpenRCGP

I reported that progress is being made on "balancing transparency."

  • We are working on a procedure for classifying as public as many Council papers (agendas, minutes, reports and background papers) as possible.
  • We are likely to recommend "live" tweeting from Council meetings with a delay.
We anticipate bringing these proposals to Council in November. We will continue to explore the following strands:
  • Practicalities and costs of publishing on RCGP intranet for members to be able to access papers classified as public. (It is felt that it would be confusing to put this material on the public-facing website).
  • The demand for and practicalities of publication of other material (such as committee papers).
    ** If this is something you would like to see, or if you know how other organisations do this, please leave a comment below **

Discussion items

Council spent considerable time discussing a response to government proposals for seven day working. It was emphasised that "spreading the jam" more thinly to provide routine care seven days a week would jeopardise urgent care services, when the priority must be to reverse years of underfunding of out of hours care. Patient rightly expect high quality, safe care: providing a universal seven day service will not achieve this.

In similar vein, Council was dismayed at the latest DDRB recommendations on junior doctor pay, particularly the removal of the GP training supplement. Chair of Council Maureen Baker had written to Jeremy Hunt expressing concern in August and received some reassurances; she will now write to him again "saying that it is urgent and imperative that a clear message is given to junior doctors that they will not be financially disadvantaged by choosing to enter general practice training".

It was noted that contract negotiations are the remit of the BMA, which responded to the news on 15 September and issued further explanation of its position on 17 September.

We also discussed the Roland Commission report on the Primary Care Workforce, which acknowledges the need for investment in primary care. It was noted that Physicians Associates (who are not independent and require supervision by a GP) are not a substitute for GPs, although they may have a helpful role to play. The assertion that email consultations should become routine was questioned.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Priority for the RCGP is to support our junior doctors . Otherwise primary care will also ultimately collapse

Anonymous said...

The RCGP needs to WAKE UP AND SMELL THE COFFEE - stop flogging your accommodation, stop worrying about wifi in GP practices, stop worrying about the "patient experience" - while you are fiddling, the GP service (along with the rest of the NHS) is burning. With PMS being yanked a frightening proportion of GP surgeries will close (many gone in Essex already), which piles pressure on the remaining few and so waiting times go up and see what happens on tripadvisor (sorry nhschoices)...patient satisfaction goes down...