Chamber and committees

The Scottish Government is committed to working with the profession, and stakeholders, to create a contract that focuses on delivering improved patient outcomes, is person centred, providing value for money and seeks to reduce unnecessary workload and bureaucracy, and emphasises patient and staff satisfaction, a contract truly delivering high trust and low bureaucracy.

The NHS boards currently using the multi disciplinary information system are: NHS Dumfries and Galloway, NHS Fife, NHS Forth Valley, NHS Highland, NHS Lanarkshire and NHS Tayside.

It is the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) which develops and maintains the general practitioner (GP) curriculum, and this has the public health role of the GP as a key element.

All three elements of public health, health improvement, promoting health and health care services, can be learnt in the practice setting and the GP trainees spend eighteen months of their training in practice. In this environment the GP trainee will be involved in health promotion, prevention and screening activities. They also have the opportunity to work with other health care professionals such as nurses and health visitors.

GP trainees can also use their protected educational half day to spend time with Public Health Specialists if this is an identified educational need.

The Primary Care Workforce Survey 2013, a survey of Scottish general practices and GP Out of Hours Services was published on 24 September 2013 and provides a “snapshot” of locums. The report is available on the Information Services Division (ISD) of National Services Scotland website at:

http://www.isdscotland.org/Health-Topics/General-Practice/Publications/2013-09-24/2013-09-24-PCWS-Report.pdf.

Overall, 89% of responding practices had used GP locums and/or sessional GPs in the year ending 31 January 2013. The estimated whole time equivalent (WTE) amount of time input by locum/sessional GPs to all general practices over this one year period was 290. This estimate is based on an assumption of eight sessions being equal to one full time working week and 44 weeks comprising a working year (allowing for six weeks annual leave and two weeks study leave). The estimated WTE input by locum/sessional GPs over the year appears to be a little higher than the equivalent estimate of 255 WTE from the 2009 Primary Care Workforce Planning Survey (for the year ending 30 January 2009).

However, as these two estimates are both based on incomplete data, they are broadly rather than directly comparable.

The role of the Scottish Government is to provide policies, frameworks and resources to NHS boards in order that they can deliver the healthcare services that meet the needs of their local population. Within this context, the actual provision of services and patient care is the statutory responsibility of health boards and healthcare professionals locally. GP practices are mostly all independent contractors who are free to decide (within the context of the services they must provide under contract with boards) exactly how they set up their operations in terms of employing staff whilst how NHS boards organise the provision of GP services is an operational matter for the board to determine, based on an assessment of local needs.

Protected Learning Time is generally co-ordinated by community health partnerships to meet locally identified training and development needs within general practice, and is facilitated by NHS boards. The information requested is not

This is subject to on-going consideration associated with the Public Bodies (Joint Working) (Scotland) Bill in the Scottish Parliament.

We already collect data on the family nurse partnership workforce for national purposes, including alignment to the licensing agreement for the programme.

GP practices already have a significant role in health protection, prevention of ill health or deterioration in the condition, health promotion and health improvement issues, delivered through the The National Health Service (General Medical Services Contracts) (Scotland) Regulations 2004, or The National Health Service (Primary Medical Services Section 17C Agreements) (Scotland) Regulations 2004.

GP Practices play an important role in public health management of single cases and outbreaks of infectious disease. They are the liaison between Public Health and the patient e.g. they help taking samples for laboratory analysis and communicating results, they may help in recruitment of patients for studies (as happened in Edinburgh for legionella studies), they manage public concern and potential cases in an outbreak, they assess, treat and vaccinate patients in a flu outbreak in nursing homes.

In particular this year there has been increased involvement of GPs as two entirely new immunisation programmes have been introduced, rotavirus for infants and shingles for 70 year olds and both of these are being given in primary care. Furthermore this year saw the first phase of childhood flu vaccination being rolled out with all two and three year olds being offered flu vaccination in primary care.

The Scottish Government is also undertaking a review of the Public Health Domain within the GMS Contract, in conjunction with Scottish General Practitioners Committee, to ensure it fits with NHS Scotland’s public health priorities.

The General Medical Council (GMC) is the regulatory body for doctors in the UK and its purpose is to protect, promote and maintain the health and safety of the public by ensuring proper standards in the practice of medicine. All doctors have to be registered by the GMC to practise and the GMC has powers to take action on serious concerns which call into question a doctor’s fitness to practise.

Individual GP practices are also responsible for the provision of the premises from which they operate and directly accountable to their contracting health board for the services they provide. This includes ensuring their premises are suitable for the delivery of their services, including cleanliness, and sufficient to meet the needs of their patients. GP contractors must also co-operate fully with any reasonable inspection or review that the health board or another relevant statutory authority wishes to undertake, that may include random visits.

The software upgrade is entirely cost-neutral as new versions of operating system software are covered as part of our Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.

As with the previous upgrade to Windows 7, no formal training programme will be required but online help and assistance will be provided via interactive guides and a purpose built online productivity hub. This will incur no additional cost.