Features

In the current climate of financial restraint my attention has been caught by two items in the press. The first was the report in the Mail on Sunday a couple of weeks back that stated that Oxfordshire PCT was going to introduce a local incentive scheme to their GPs to try and tighten up the referral service and cut down the number of inappropriate referrals, thereby saving costs.

This may seem to be a sensible idea on the surface and provided it is run transparently the system could work well. But, as usual with the NHS, this incentive scheme relies on the premise that it is only GPs who make referrals. As we all know we have been able to refer patients directly to an eye clinic for some time, and indeed our new contract says that is what we should do in all cases deemed appropriate. I assume that there has been a printing error in the story and that the PCT, being fully aware of the situation, really meant that the incentive scheme was going to be extended to optometrists as well as GPs. Of course, it might be that the PCT gave no thought to the presence of optometry within the NHS or, if it did, deliberately decided to discriminate against clinicians other than their GPs. I would hope that the LOC has taken this matter up with the PCT on behalf of its clinicians.

The second matter was the call that not only should central government make prompt payments within 10 days to small businesses, but that it should extend this undertaking to other areas of government such as local authorities and NHS Trusts - be they primary care or secondary trusts. As we all know we have always had to wait too long for our NHS payments.

With this in mind I would urge all LOCs at a local level and the AOP at a national level to make urgent representations to the DoH requiring NHS payments to be made more promptly than they have been.

While I am on the topic of payments I was involved in a conversation the other day as to how I sent claim forms to my local payments agency. This was as a result of a colleague having been told by his payments agency that they had never received his NHS forms for the previous month. It transpired that, effectively, the only certain way to ensure that the payments agency receives your forms is to hand deliver them and then get a signature from the recipient to confirm they have received the forms.

My first reaction was that this was so totally over the top and impractical that it verged on the absurd. However, when I thought about it this is probably the only way to ensure the safety of these forms. Never forget that in posting a large number of NHS forms you, as the contractor, are responsible for the safe transfer of patient-identifiable data which may include National Insurance and NHS numbers. Surely the time has come to improve this antiquated and insecure system. ●

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