There was an LMC Conference on Saturday 31st of January, which was a chance for all the local medical committees to speak up about their concerns and issues with general practice. They spoke, debated and demanded, and came to the conclusion that government was not providing a solution, but we need to find one immediately.
One topic of conversation was talking about trying to find a solution to the spending issues around recruitment. And one thing that kept coming up was restrictions on agencies supplying staff.
Our Managing Director, Tawhid Juneja, commented on this in saying, “the government is saying they just want to use agencies who are on national frameworks. But the national frameworks are only secondary care, not primary care.
Therefore, we have clients not wanting to use us because we are not on the frameworks, which means us (alongside other agencies) cannot provide skilled Primary Care clinicians. But that will only create further issues when our clients do not have the nurses they need.”
Not only that, the government is also saying those nurses should be employed by what band they are on. Which we know by experience that if a nurse has the right skillset they can really benefit in certain healthcare environments that are struggling.
He went on to say “we propose that Urgent Care Centres should be treated separately to other practices and centres, and have no pigeon hole of band nurses. Because otherwise the UCC’s job of relieving A&E will not be able to function. And nurses will no skills would be there instead.”
We believe this because UCC’s need an affective team to perform its function. We recognise this first-hand from when we told the UCC’s that we could cost them a more effective solution of using Nurse Practitioners and Practice Nurses with minor injury skills.
We feel this is just another example of a system gone wrong and not thought through.
Please let us know your thoughts on this.
Or any thoughts you may have had from the day.
Email: work@primarycarepeople.co.uk
Primary Care People 