Source · Select Committees · Health and Social Care Committee
Recommendation 11
11
Accepted
Paragraph: 57
General practice administrative workload remains unsustainable despite initial reduction efforts.
Conclusion
The Government and NHS England have made a start on reducing the administrative workload in general practice, and it is also encouraging to see some Integrated Care Systems agreeing to try to reduce the amount of work that is inappropriately transferred from secondary care to primary care. However, it is clear that there is still a long way to go to make GP workloads more sustainable.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government partially accepts, focusing on existing GP retention schemes (National GP Retention Scheme, Fellowship Programme) and exploring flexible working to support retention, while noting that GP partnerships are responsible for reviewing working conditions.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
57
Government Response
Accepted
HM Government · verbatim extract
Accepted
Partially accept. The Department partially accepts this recommendation. We agree that e-prescribing should be introduced in hospitals. Work is already underway, with NHS England working on [...truncated...] pension tax charges do not act as a driver for early retirements, which expect will encourage GPs to continue to work. In addition, the Department has changed NHS pension scheme rules to prevent staff receiving unintentionally higher annual allowance tax charges driven by the current high inflation environment. Taken as a whole, these tax measures will encourage experienced GPs to remain in practice. As promised in Our Plan for Patients, we are implementing new retirement flexibilities to help retain experienced staff, including GPs, whilst making it easier and attractive for retired staff to return. We abolished from 1 April 2023 the pension rule that staff could only work up to 16 hours a week in the first month after returning from retirement without affecting their pension. We removed from 1 April 2023 the rule that prevented retired staff who return to NHS work from re-joining the scheme and building up more pension. We intend making a new ‘partial retirement’ option available to staff from October 2023 as an alternative to full retirement. Staff will be able to draw down some or all their pension whilst continuing to work and build up further pension. Our Plan for Patients set out that we will work with NHS England to ensure that NHS employers are able to offer local solutions to pension tax issues such as employer pension contribution recycling. This is already within the gift of employers in general practice. However, the changes announced at Budget mean far fewer staff will now experience pension tax issues and so the need for local solutions reduces.
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