In this edition
Welcome to our Wandsworth LMC newsletter. We aim to inform you about the role of the LMC and how the LMC can support you in your practice. As you will see we have news sections and standing information sections. It’s been a busy few months with the conference season now over, but with the contract dispute hotting up. We are eagerly awaiting news of any developments with the arrival of the new government.
What is the LMC and what do we do? We:
- Are the representative body for General Practice that is recognised in statute
- Consult with NHS bodies, integrated care boards (ICBs) and local councils, negotiating local contract terms for general practice
- Work for and support individual GPs and practices and are the professional voice of general practice at a local level
- Support GPs via knowledge of contracts, systems, stakeholders at all levels, including borough, ICB, regional and national
- Inform and engage with workforce development, planning, education and training for all roles within general practice
BMA contract dispute
The BMA are now in dispute with NHS England in relation to the 2024/25 General Practice Contract.
Partners and /or Contract holders are urged to take part in the upcoming ballot- Katie Brammall-Stainer has said the ballot for partners only will close on 29 July and can only be taken by BMA members. The BMA is offering a free 3-month membership. See the BMA website, further down the page are nine actions the BMA are recommending to practices (under GP practice survival toolkit).
UK LMC conference (Newport, May) and LMC/ BMA (Friends House roadshow June 2024)
Jeremy Gray and Savita Ghattaora attended both these events on behalf of the committee.
You can access the results of each motion here and if you want to hear more about the June Roadshow, please contact Savita, if you wish further information (her contact details are available towards the end of this newsletter).
LMC working on your behalf:
Successful 2023/2024 PMS KPI Review Process
The LMC worked with the ICB to review the PMS services for Wandsworth earlier this year. Although the specifications increased from 7 to 12 there has been a significant removal of activity from a number of specifications. The LMC pushed for an uplift in funding to reflect the 6% salary increase for salaried staff that came into force throughout 2023/24 and this is reflected in the new prices for new specifications.
Prostate Cancer Stratified Follow Up specification
There was a proposal that a Prostate Cancer Stratified Follow Up specification be included in the PMS KPIs, but the LMC successfully negotiated for it to be excluded from the PMS KPIs. The LMC had pushed for this service to be commissioned and funded separately as a locally commissioned service for practices, but the ICB could not identify sufficient funding for this to be progressed. Practices are not currently funded for any work they might be doing in this regard so a reminder that they are not obliged to undertake the work.
Demand Management scheme
The LMC successfully worked with ICB colleagues to ensure that proposed changes to the Demand Management commissioned service were fair, deliverable and gave practices sufficient time to report their activity. This work resulted in revised specification content which enabled more practices to achieve full funding for the amended elements of the scheme.
Pharmacy emails
We are currently engaged with our pharmacy advisors about reducing the multiple email messages received about drug shortages drug safety and other pharmacy matters
IT developments
At the LMC meeting on 5 July, a fascinating presentation was given by Nicholas Grundy a GP in Richmond, who is from a digitally advanced practice who spoke about some IT developments that his practice among others in South West London are exploring.
Funding may be available from the ICB for practices to take part in further exploratory work to find out for themselves what developments are currently taking place.
LMC representation at other fora
Members continue to attend the Wandsworth Primary care Operations Group (Harriet Wheldon), a pharmacy liaison group between LMCs and the LPCs (Nasr Khan), the SWL Joint Formulary Committee (Zahid Ghufoor) and the Wandsworth Primary Care Programme Board (Jeremy Gray). The practice managers forum is hosted by Sam Metcalf, who also attends on behalf of the LMC.
Your LMC
You can feed into these groups any issues you as LMC constituents wish to raise. Contact the relevant LMC committee member – contact details are shown below:
- Dr Soleman Beg, St Johns Hill Surgery – Begg Practice
- Dr Ashleigh Helm, Putneymead
- Dr Savita Ghattaora, Grafton Medical Partners
- Dr Zahid Ghufoor, Streatham Park Surgery
- Dr Jeremy Gray (LMC Chair), Falcon Road Medical Centre
- Dr Farah Jamil, Brocklebank Group Practice
- Dr Nasr Khan, Junction Health Centre
- Dr Emily Northern, Thurleigh Road Practice
- Dr Penelope Smith, Grafton Medical Partners
- Dr Harriet Wheldon, Battersea Rise Group Practice
- Dr Stephen Woolford (VTS rep), Thurleigh Road Practice
- Sam Metcalf (PM rep), Elborough Street Surgery
Londonwide’s LMC Team supporting Wandsworth LMC:
- Dr Asiya Yunus, Medical Director
- Kate Hudson, Director of Primary Care
- Nicola Rice, Assistant Director of Primary Care
- David Moore, Committee Liaison Executive
- Kat Lederle, Committee Administrator
- Wandsworth LMC members and the Londonwide LMCs team can be contacted via David Moore – David.moore@lmc.org.uk
GP Support Team
The GP Support team provides expert, confidential and bespoke advice and support to individual constituent GPs and practices in difficulties. – Contact: GPSupport@lmc.org.uk
General Practice Alert System (GPAS)
Londonwide LMCs and other LMCs nationally are rolling out the GP alert system (GPAS). We began this in 2022 and to date GPAS is now operating in the majority of our London boroughs, with the remaining ones going live between July and September this year.GPAS will help to inform the rest of the NHS on the pressures faced by general practice and will change the narrative, so that pressure in general practice is considered a system problem rather than an individual practice’s failings.
It is important that we demonstrate this to the rest of the NHS system and if we don’t do this ourselves, the ICBs will implement their own data gathering process. We have this short window of opportunity to implement a system for ourselves, led by the LMC and to do this effectively we need practices to sign up.
As part of this we have now updated our guidance on GPAS levels giving clear ratios of FTE GPs to registered patients and of available GPs to patient appointments provided. The guidance also now details what measures practices can take when they reach an escalated GPAS level, such as amber or red, to mitigate some of the pressures on them. GPAS is based on three variables: workload, workforce and clinical administration. All three need to be considered when assessing your rating as green, amber, red or black. You can read more on this here.
Easy sign-up to GPAS: -Your sector teams here at Londonwide will support you and the process to do this is very simple. Submit your practices details here to sign-up. Following this, all you will need is one person within the practice to fill in a form of six questions every week taking only 3 minutes of practice time to give the rich data we need to be able to put forward our case.
Speaking up for general practice – At present, all practices are struggling to meet demand and due to this, workload is becoming unmanageable and unsafe. Practices often feel powerless to do anything to control this for fear of being in breach of contract. The BMA (British Medical Association) has produced its guidance on, Safe Working in General Practice and we encourage you to read this.
Remember GPAS is a system set up by general practice for general practice. The data is anonymous and is collected by your trusted partner Londonwide LMCs to enable us to show our pressures against the Operational Pressures Escalation Levels (OPEL) system used by hospital trusts and ambulance services.
Be part of the opportunity to control our own narrative. The more practices engaged with this the more powerful the data becomes.
Yours faithfully,
Jeremy Gray, Chair, Wandsworth LMC