Otherwise known as ‘get your hospital tests done at your local practice’.
GP Practices are not contractually responsible for carrying out tests or other monitoring for hospital outwith the ‘GP Enhanced Services Programme: Disease modifying drugs’ service agreement which covers only a few medications.
During the COVID pandemic GP Practices willingly but temporarily carried out a variety of hospital monitoring services to prevent patients from having to travel to hospitals and potentially catch or spread COVID infection. Both the ‘GP Enhanced Services Programme: Disease modifying drugs’ service agreement and GP Practice activity during the pandemic have understandably led to the misunderstanding that GP Practices are responsible for carrying out hospital services as well as GP services.
GP Practices are only contractually responsible for the work that their GPs generate and taking on extra services without the adequate competencies or resources only lessens the GP services that they are responsible for providing. Over the past few years our practice has experienced an unsustainably high workload leading to long waiting times for our own tests irrespective of hospital tests.
For these reasons the Almond Group Practice will not be carrying out services or monitoring on the behalf of hospital clinics until such a time that adequate training, resources and funding are provide by the Healthboards and Scottish Government. This position is supported by the Local Medical Committee (LMC)