We have previously highlighted the PCSE incident whereby 148,000 patient medical records were erroneously archived instead of being sent to the subsequent GP practices. These records will have been sent to the practices that currently have the patients registered, and NHS England expects those practices to undertake an assessment of harm for each patient affected.
Over the past few weeks, GPC England has been in discussions with NHS England to highlight the impact this will have on practices and their patients. We have been clear that practices should receive the necessary support to cover the additional costs of dealing with a problem for which they are not to blame to ensure that GPs and other practice staff are not taken away from direct patient-facing provision. Further BMA guidance on the service failures can be accessed using the link.
Unfortunately, NHS England is not prepared to provide the amount of funding that we believe is necessary to cover GP and practice staff time required to do this assessment properly. GPC England was not prepared to agree to a settlement which we believed would not fully compensate practices for the problems created by Capita. If you would like to come forward and ask NHS England what compensation they are able to offer to your practice, please contact england.reports@nhs.net. Practices should carefully consider whether any offer made reflects the work that will need to be undertaken and whether it will adequately compensate them. If a practice believes the offer is sufficient and accepts it, they will not be able to claim additional monies via any legal route. If, however, a practice considers the offer does not reflect the work that will be required and decides to reject it with the hope of claiming compensation via a legal route for the additional work, we would recommend that the practice contacts the BMA support@bma.org.uk with the attached pro forma so that we can start to collate the necessary information to take forward legal action.