BMA issues ultimatum on GP contract in Northern Ireland

The BMA in Northern Ireland has warned that GPs would not deliver the government’s “Transforming Your Care” programme if the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety went ahead with its plans to impose a new general medical services (GMS) contract in April.

GPs in Northern Ireland would not be able to manage the huge amount of extra work implied by the new GMS contract and the movement of work from hospitals to primary care that will occur under Transforming Your Care, the Northern Ireland General Practitioners Committee has said.

The programme and the new contract combined would create an “impossible workload” for GPs in Northern Ireland, said Tom Black, chairman of the committee.

“It’s not that we’re refusing to join the [Transforming Your Care] system, it’s that it would be impossible for us to take on both loads of work at the same time,” he said. “So really we’re asking the minister to choose: does he want a contract imposition that is full of impossible, impractical, unreasonable targets or does he want us to join in with [Transforming Your Care]?”

In 2011 the Department of Health, Social Services and Public Safety conducted a review of health and social care services in Northern Ireland, which recommended that more care should be provided in community based services and at home and that services should be better integrated at a local level. The subsequent consultation last year, “Transforming Your Care: From Vision to Action,” spelled out the shift of care from hospitals to primary and community care and the establishment of 17 integrated care partnerships.

In addition, the Northern Ireland government announced last year a raft of changes to the GMS contract, which it planned to introduce irrespective of the agreement of the profession. The BMA estimated that the new contract could increase Northern Ireland GPs’ workload by up to 15% without providing any additional funding.1

The health department argues that the new GMS contract should contribute directly towards the delivery of Transforming Your Care. A department spokesman said, “Our primary aim through [Transforming Your Care] and the GMS contract is to bring about change in our health and social care system to deliver the best possible outcomes for the patients of Northern Ireland.”

The department has said that it was “unfortunate” that an agreement could not be reached on the GMS contract. “However, the department remains very willing to continue dialogue with [the Northern Ireland General Practitioners Committee] about the proposed changes, including as part of our planned consultation, in an effort to reach an acceptable agreement,” a spokesman said.

Consultation on the proposed changes to the contract remains open until 22 March 2013.