You may be aware that yesterday NHS England published the draft service specifications for PCN’s new obligations form 1st April, as a wonderful Christmas present to everybody!
Details can be found via the following link: https://www.engage.england.nhs.uk/survey/primary-care-networks-service-specifications/
You will see that the proposals bring a massive amount of additional work and bureaucracy, with, inter alia, a requirement for each PCN to appoint a clinical lead for each of the five new service specifications. There is no additional funding for all this new work beyond the inadequate new resources announced next year; the work has to be delivered by existing practice staff together with any additional posts PCNs are able to recruit to, which of course will require a 30% practice contribution to employment costs.
It goes without saying that it seems very unlikely that the requirements of the specifications can be delivered within the available practice/PCN resources and capacity, and certainly not without detriment to both delivery of practice core services and risk to practice sustainability. The idea that this will actually also help practices with their core workload is fanciful, to say the least.
There is a stakeholder “consultation” process, by means of filling in a survey monkey to a handful of questions, which closes on 15 January. In all honesty, whilst I would encourage all GPs, practices and PCNs to respond and make their views known, the way the process has been structured and questions worded it seems extremely unlikely that sufficient changes will be made to these specifications to be sufficiently scaled down to make them deliverable, let alone to enable support to practices to deal with current challenges.
I suspect, bearing in mind the history of the last 15 years, that any changes to the specifications following the consultation will be cosmetic at best, and, that the only chance to achieve any meaningful changes to make them deliverable and to bring about the resources needed to properly support general practice would be for practices en masse to signal their intentions that, as things stand, they would have no alternative but to serve notice on the PCN DES.