Another Year Over, What’s Next?

April 16, 2016

Where are we up to?

Well, that’s another financial year over and done with. Some of you may still have a couple of end of year returns to complete and submit such as the Avoiding Unplanned Admissions declaration or the Dispensing Services Quality Scheme audit, but what lies ahead for 2016-17 and what do we have to look forward to?

Our Nurses revalidation process officially kicked off on 1 April, it will be interesting to see how that goes during the first year. The CQC registration fees that we pay, together with grant-in-aid from the Government, have increased. The Government policy for fee-setting regulators is that chargeable costs must be fully covered through fees income. The CQC say this means they must increase the fees they charge to providers and reduce their reliance on grant-in-aid.

The 2016-17 GP Contract

The annual review of the new GP contract for 2016/17 has been publishes and the main changes include:

GP practices will be required to record data on the availability of evening and weekend opening for routine appointments, which is to be collected until 2020/21.
GP practices will record annually the number of instances where a practice pays a locum doctor more than an indicative maximum rate, as set out by NHS England.
The MenACWY Vaccine – 18 years will be extended to allow for the opportunistic vaccination of 19-25 year old non-freshers who self-present for vaccination.
NHS Employers and GPC will work with NHS England and the Department of Health to ensure that appropriate and meaningful data relating to patients’ named accountable GP is made available at practice level. This data will be shared internally within practices and used to improve services for patients.
Whilst the Avoiding Unplanned Admissions Enhanced Service (ES) will continue for a further year with minor amendments to clarify the timeframe around care planning, consideration will be given to its future during the 2017/18 negotiations.
The Dementia Enhanced Service will cease as at 31 March 2016 and the £42 million resource will be transferred into global sum, in recognition of the fact that GPs are more routinely diagnosing dementia. All other Enhanced Services will continue unchanged.

New tips and mythbusters for GP practices

Each month the CQC publishes its mythbusters for GP practices and last month new mythbusters included information on key lines of enquiry, and arrangements for emergencies and major incidents. This list is growing rapidly and is a really useful resource for Practices in preparation for their CQC visit, if they haven’t already had one.