Child Safeguarding Judicial Review
Following longstanding concerns about the failure of many areas to make proper payment to cover the costs to practices for work covered by collaborative arrangements, as I said at the LMC England Conference, the BMA launched an application for judicial review in Northamptonshire challenging the failure to make any financial provision for child safeguarding services provided by GPs. We have now been informed that our application for judicial review has been granted permission by the Administrative Court, which will be listed in the next few months. The focus now will be on collating mutual Counsel availability times to try to lock in a date which the parties can all do.
PCN Service Specifications survey
As I highlighted earlier this week, NHS England and NHS Improvement have published draft PCN service specifications and an accompanying survey asking for feedback. GPC England will engage with NHSEI in negotiations on the service specifications in the coming weeks and this will be influenced by the responses to the consultation. GPC England will be meeting on 16 January to discuss these proposals from NHSEI. We would therefore ask LMCs to circulate the link to the survey to local practices and clinical directors and to encourage as many as possible to make their views known as soon as they can.
NHSEI are also running a series of webinars where the outline service specifications will be discussed, on Wednesday 8 January 2020 at 12.00-1.30pm and Thursday 9 January 2020 at 10am-11.30am. Nikki Kanani, NHSE Medical Director for Primary Care, will also be hosting a #primarycarenetworks Twitter chat on 7 January 2020 at 20.00. In addition a webinar focusing on the community services elements of the Enhanced Health in Care Homes and Anticipatory Care service specifications, aimed at directors and chief executives of community health providers will be held on Tuesday 14 January 2020 – 3pm-4.30pm.
For community health providers, NHSEI plan to commission service requirements via the NHS Standard Contract. These requirements form part of the consultation on the Standard Contract, which will run from 19 December 2019 to 31 January 2020 and can be found here.
Primary Care Network conference
It is still possible to book to join a large number of PCN leaders at our second PCN Conference which will be on Saturday 8 February, at the ICC Birmingham. This will be an important opportunity to learn about what is happening in networks around England, share good examples and explore solutions to problems. Please see attached the outline programme which is also available on our PCN Support webpages https://pcn.bma.org.uk/
For more information and to get your early bird discount by 8 January see this page www.bma.org.uk/pcn-whats-next