Source · Select Committees · Health and Social Care Committee
Recommendation 15
15
Deferred
Paragraph: 61
NHS staff should not be forced into locum work or inter-practice competition.
Conclusion
As we said in our recent Report on the NHS workforce, no NHS employee should be forced to choose to locum or work for an agency to regain control over their working The future of general practice 41 life. This is equally true in NHS general practice. As well as this, GP practices should not be forced to outcompete each other to be able to ensure adequate staffing cover to provide care for their patients.
Government Response Summary
The government partially accepts, stating they will introduce methods to promote continuity of care and consider how best to measure it, but will not commit to a specific measure by 2024, which is unrelated to the committee's recommendation on locum work and staff competition.
Paragraph Reference:
61
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government
Deferred
Partially accept. The Department partially accepts this recommendation. We agree that continuity of care is important in general practice, and we are introducing methods to further promote continuity of care in general practice to help ensure more patients can benefit from it when appropriate. We will consider how best to measure continuity of care, but we do not agree with the specific approach described. Firstly, continuity of care would need to be accurately defined for a national measure to be practicable. Alongside an individual GP or doctor, a multi- disciplinary team can provide continuity of care to a patient, leveraging their combined skills and offering continuity as a team, and we would want a measure to reflect this. The two measures proposed above do not do this. In addition, any national measure of continuity of care in general practice would need to be designed carefully to ensure that increased continuity of care is provided to those patients who most need it, while ensuring practices are not constrained from making best use of the skills and time of their general practitioners and multidisciplinary teams to meet their patients’ needs. While we will consider whether it is practicable to introduce a measure which achieves these aims, it would not therefore be appropriate to commit to introducing a measure by 2024.