Shared Care Agreements & Collective Action

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Collective Action

On the 1st of August 2024, as a result of the proposed contract changes for General Practices, there was a national vote whether to go on collective action. Of balloted members, 98.3% (including Fernlea Surgery) voted for collective action.

What does this mean?

Practices will be taking certain actions, which include but not limited to the following (noting these actions may be permanent changes in some circumstances):

  1. Limiting daily patient contacts per clinician to the UEMO (European Union of GPs) recommended safe maximum of 25. Divert patients to local urgent care settings once daily maximum capacity has been reached. We strongly advise consultations are offered face-to-face. This is better for patients and clinicians.
  2. Stop engaging with the e-Referral Advice & Guidance pathway – unless it is a timely and clinically helpful process for you in your professional role​.
  3. Stop supporting the system at the expense of your business and staff – serve notice on any voluntary services currently undertaken that plug local commissioning gaps.
  4. Stop rationing referrals, investigations, and admissions​:
    • refer, investigate or admit your patient for specialist care when it is clinically appropriate to do so
    • refer via eRS for 2-week wait (2WW) appointments, but outside of that write a professional referral letter where this is preferable.
  5. Switch off GPConnect functionality to permit the entry of coding into the GP clinical record by third-party providers.
  6. Withdraw permission for data sharing agreements that exclusively use data for secondary purposes (that is, not direct care).
  7. Freeze sign-up to any new data sharing agreements or local system data sharing platforms.
  8. Switch off medicines optimisation software embedded by the local ICB for the purposes of system financial savings and/or rationing, rather than the clinical benefit of your patients.
  9. Practices should defer signing declarations of completion for “better digital telephony” and “simpler online requests” until further GPC England guidance.
    • Defer signing off “better digital telephony”: do not agree yet to share your call volume data metrics with NHS England.
    • Defer signing off “Simpler online requests”: do not agree yet to keep your online triage tools on throughout core practice opening hours, even when you have reached your maximum safe capacity.
  10. Defer making any decisions to accept local or national NHS England pilot programmes during the proposed period of action.

Shared Care Agreements

As a result of collective action, Fernlea Surgery has decided that we will no longer sign up to any new shared care agreements for certain conditions / medications, from any provider, including NHS providers. Existing shared care agreements will be honoured but are subject to review.

SCAs we will not agree to:

  1. ADHD