GP surgeries to open for an extra 30 minutes a week for every 1,000 patients registered
GP surgeries in England will be open longer from April under Government plans to require surgeries to provide an extra 30 minutes of opening time per week for every 1,000 registered patients.
Later this month, the BMA’s General Practitioners Committee is to ask doctors to vote on whether to accept a Department of Health proposal for extended opening. The DoH wants to reroute £158m from 2007–08 access incentive schemes and pay it to GP practices as a £2.80 per patient allowance for extended opening in 2008–09. If GPs do not accept this, the same money will be given to primary care trusts to commission extended hours services from other providers and GPs will lose some of the money currently available to them under the Quality and Outcomes Framework.
Commenting on the plan, GPs’ committee chairman Laurence Buckman said: “GPs have been put in an impossible position and will have to choose between two unacceptable
alternatives.”
The committee has decided not to advise GPs on how to vote. But it has told them that the proposal is less bad than the alternative that will be imposed on doctors if they reject it. That, the committee said, would harm the underlying fabric of NHS general practice and patient care more quickly and more
lastingly.
A spokesman for the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee said that the PSNC welcomed anything that enabled patients to access care out of hours. He added that pharmacies were open at times when GP surgeries were closed and they should be made use of as well.
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