Un-resourced work from secondary care

Practices are currently facing a significant challenge as capacity is reduced by the need to adhere to infection control measures and pent up demand from patients staying away from practices during the early stages of the pandemic has been released, with these people now seeking appointments in large numbers. Against this difficult background we are hearing more cases of hospitals passing non-contractual work to GPs, we understand the pressures on hospital colleagues, but it is in everyone’s interests that general practice capacity is not pulled away from keeping people well in the community.

We have prepared a template letter for LMCs, PCNs and GPs to send to their local trust CEO/CMOs urging them to follow the example set by Barts Healthcare in ensuring that consultants and clinical teams directly request the blood and diagnostic tests that they require, and directly prescribe hospital-only medications, rather than ask GPs to do either of these on their behalf.

You can download the template letter here.

We have also added a category for ‘referral management’ issues to our Beam to LMC app to make it even easier for you to report, and allow us to help you tackle, workload issues at the primary/secondary care interface. Find out more here.

Last updated : 21 Jul 2020

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