NHS GPs must be funded appropriately for any follow-up work that arises from requests from private healthcare providers, local medical leaders have urged.
The annual conference of UK local medical committees, taking place on 18-19 May in London, acknowledged that, with the NHS under severe strain, patients were increasingly seeking healthcare privately, including travelling abroad for surgery.
But a five part motion passed in full instructed the BMA’s GP committees of the four UK nations to work with authorities to ensure that “any involvement in a patient’s care by an NHS GP as requested by a private healthcare or insurance provider should be remunerated appropriately.”
Proposing the motion, David Reid, from Forth Valley LMC in Scotland, said that stretched practices were too often having to “pick up a lot of the pieces” when patients presented to them for private referrals.
He said, “General practice has long been the gatekeeper to the NHS. But I don’t believe we should also be the gatekeepers to private healthcare services.
“I recognise that the private sector does provide a valuable healthcare avenue for some patients where there are deficient or inadequate NHS services. We can all think of patients who are fed up [while] on NHS waiting lists. Patients are desperate . . . but they can often not afford the follow-up, and when they turn to the NHS there is no service, or the health board or trust won’t fund it.”
Reid added, “I think many of us might be happy to check the odd blood test if there was a robust shared care agreement on funding that followed it. We really are hanging on by a thread, and every additional bit of work without the funding is pulling harder and harder on it.”
Speaking in favour of the motion, Nafeesa Arshad, from Avon LMC, said that GPs were receiving requests every day from patients who had accessed care privately. “These referrals are important, but they exhaust our resources and our time,” she said.
The motion affirmed that private providers should be required to act on investigations undertaken with patients they saw and not simply pass results and referrals on to NHS GPs to act on and to ensure that people who could not get the required follow-up were not left without adequate specialist care.
Private providers should also be obliged to inform patients of the total cost of recommended investigations, treatments, and follow-up and make it clear to patients that these might not be provided by their NHS GP, the motion added.
Alongside this, the motion called for the BMA’s GP committees to work with appropriate authorities to ensure that patients were not required to seek approval from their NHS GP before accessing private healthcare.
Michael McKenna, a GP from Eastern LMC in Northern Ireland, spoke against this specific part of the motion, on the grounds that waiting times in Northern Ireland were so bad that patients had no choice but to go private and that he wanted to be able to advise them.
He told the conference, “In Northern Ireland we don’t have a service for some clinical specialties. In neurology our routine waiting list is seven years. Our rheumatology routine waiting list is nine years. My patients do not have any choice when they come in to see me; they have to go down the private route. Even if I’m saying the only option is to go private, I want them to come and see me about that. I am the gatekeeper, so I will help them down that route.”