IJB backs GP practice remodelling

A report to the board recommended that the Partnership should begin a procurement
process to identify suitably qualified parties to operate the six as a single independent
business and work with all staff to deliver improvements and innovations.

ACHSCP Chief officer Sandra McLeod told the board: “We embarked upon remodelling with
a clear purpose – to improve and enhance our GP services in the city. It is certainly not
about reducing or removing services. It is about making them more robust and more
sustainable so that they meet future needs as demand increases and becomes more
complex, and resourcing becomes tighter.

“Most practices in Aberdeen and across Scotland are managed as independent businesses
by GP partners, who contract their primary care services to the NHS. This is the model
favoured nationally in the new General Medical Services contract and by the Local Medical
Committee and has been the standard model for delivering general practice since the birth of
the NHS more than 70 years ago.

“This has nothing to do with ‘privatisation’. Practices will still be very much part of our public
sector delivery, receiving public funding for the services they deliver and very much at the
heart of our public service ethos.

“Any tender which fails to deliver on this would not be acceptable to the Partnership, to NHS
Grampian or the IJB and I hope that people will take this as a cast-iron reassurance from me
that our proposals are put forward very much with the interests of our patients and our staff
at heart.”

IJB chair Councillor Sarah Duncan said: “The remodelling aims to improve the sustainability
of all of our GP practices in the city and ensure they continue to provide excellent personcentred care for patients.

“Patients will not see any immediate large-scale changes at their GP practice but in the
longer term, remodelling will create a far more flexible service which can adapt to changing
patient needs. It also parallels our work in primary care to provide additional services and
create multi-disciplinary teams.

“This will encourage better collaboration and much more cross-system working to ease the
pressure on GPs, allowing them to focus on their roles as expert medical generalists. I firmly
believe that this will create more equal resourcing across practices, increase their
sustainability and significantly enhance the services they can offer their patients.

“The procurement process involving all of the six practices will invite innovative business
cases which should stimulate new possibilities for service delivery – and this will open up
more collaboration and support between practices, creating greater flexibility for patients and
more opportunities for staff.”

Work will now proceed to develop the procurement process in collaboration with practice
staff, which will see tenders evaluated against a set of criteria designed to encourage
creative new ways of delivering primary care services, to benefit patients and to provide
safeguards for staff.

IJB members were assured that vital health services for particularly vulnerable patients
would be protected under the procurement criteria. Councillor Duncan said: “No tender
would be awarded which would put any practice area or any patient at a disadvantage or
subject to inequality.”