15.06.15
Royal College of GPs calls for QOF to be scrapped
The government should conduct an immediate review of the “unnecessary burdens” the CQC places on GP practices, and replace the Quality and Outcomes Framework with a new funding arrangement, the Royal College of GPs (RCGP) has said.
The college has released a blueprint for building a ‘new deal’ for general practice in England, which details how the government can secure the long term future of family doctors and deliver the Five Year Forward View.
It calls for an “immediate review of Care Quality Commission (CQC) inspections and regulatory processes to eliminate unnecessary burdens for general practice”. This follows the passing of a ballot measure at the recent LMC conference calling for the regulator to be decommissioned.
The blueprint also calls for the government to look at reducing the bureaucracy and red tape facing GPs and how it can be reduced so that they can be “freed up to focus on delivering high quality patient care”.
It says: “There are concerns, in particular, that general practice does not have the capacity to withstand a major health crisis such as a national flu outbreak, and that GPs who want to spend more time developing new models of patient care are being prevented from doing so due to current pressure levels.”
The RCGP say that this could be partly achieved through scrapping QOF. The college wants the GPC to replace it with a new funding arrangement that will provide GPs with more freedom.
The paper also calls for time to be given for GPs to innovate and empower them to develop new models of care. The first step in this, the blueprint says, is to provide practices with funding to pilot the employment of pharmacists in GP teams – as proposed by the RCGP and Royal Pharmaceutical Society in March.
As part of the effort to grow the general practice workforce by 8,000 it also suggests the government immediately provide financial and political backing to the 10-point GP workforce action plan set out by NHS England, Higher Education England, the BMA and the RCGP.
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