Negotiating in a storm came at a stark cost

Health & Social Care and the practices were negotiating at a time of severe pressure, with real fears that the service could collapse under the strain of not having enough healthy staff to care for residents combined with another danger of a practice being bankrupted by losing much of their income overnight.

Two of the groups have made it plain they did not think a crisis was the time to be negotiating what health care will look like in five or 10 years and simply took payments for the work they did in helping navigate the pandemic.

Queens Road signed up to a contract that saw it paid substantially more in those three months, but crucially perhaps tying it into the partnership of purpose. This included £100,000 per month towards support costs and overheads as well as fees for doctors and nurses.

The discrepancy in payments is stark, the short-term benefit to the taxpayer above simply paying for services muddy.

There were small reductions in fees for telephone consultations and repeat prescriptions for three months, but limited awareness of that in the wider public.

HSC’s vision for primary care appears to be about breaking down its role as gatekeeper to access the health service coupled with moving away from grant payments based on the number of appointments towards contracts based on the service being offered.

There are perceived inefficiencies in how people are cared for out in the community such as in care homes. The future model has not been decided, it remains a rather nebulous set of ideas and will be until into the next term – in effect the primary care practices were being asked to ride a unicorn in a storm with no control of the reins and unsurprisingly, two baulked.

A £20m. annual price tag has been attached to primary care reforms – a fractured relationship going into those changes is a bad place to start.