GP leaders from a local medical committee (LMC) last week filed an “emergency motion” to hold a ballot on collective and industrial action including “non-compliance with GP Connect” due to “growing concerns”.
GP Connect Update Record, first rolled out in April last year, is a service that allows pharmacists to update GP records with summaries from Pharmacy First consultations and became a mandatory part of the GP contract last month.
Read more: BMA and RCGP warn government not to switch-on GP Connect
The “emergency motion” was proposed by Avon LMC and filed in the British Medical Association’s (BMA) supplementary agenda for its annual conference of England LMC representatives – held last week (November 7).
It demanded that “a clear timeline be set out for an indicative ballot of the profession” on the topic of “non-compliance with GP Connect”, among other things.
Avon LMC explained that the motion was raised due to “growing concerns over data protection, inappropriate third-party access and the erosion of patient confidentiality”.
Read more: GPs call for Pharmacy First funds to be ‘reallocated’ to practices
While the motion was not debated due to time constraints, conference chair Dr Clare Sieber said that proposers of “timed out” motions are “invited to submit them” to the BMA’s GP Committee for England (GPCE) for consideration.
According to the motion, any ballot held would “seek engagement and mandate on the…forms of collective and industrial action” to be taken and comes “in light of GPCE’s decision to enter into dispute with the current government”.
“Immediate abolition”
GP leaders did, however, vote in favour of negotiating an “immediate abolition” of the “one-mile dispensing rule” at the conference, which prevents dispensing doctors from dispensing prescriptions to patients who live within one mile of a pharmacy.
Proposed by Devon LMC and contributed to by Oxfordshire LMC, the motion called on GPCE to “negotiate immediate abolition” of the one-mile rule, arguing that dispensing doctors should be able to “compete fairly with pharmacies”.
Dr Sieber said that the motion was “carried nem con” – unanimously – which means that it will now be adopted as official BMA policy.
Read more: Efforts by GPs to undermine Pharmacy First only strengthen it
The conference agenda also included a motion calling for Pharmacy First funding to be “reallocated to general practice” to ensure patients receive “continuity of care from their GP team”.
While the motion was not voted on, the BMA said that the GPCE chair “is prepared to accept [it] without debate as a reference” rather than as policy.
Read more: Pharmacy bodies unite to slam ‘sneering’ GP letter
The motion claimed that the Pharmacy First service has “shortcomings”, including “limitations in scope, variability in service quality and the risk of fragmenting patient care”.
And it added that the “redirection of funding from general practice to Pharmacy First undermines the sustainability of primary care services”.
GP Connect chaos
It comes as IT officials from the BMA and the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) said in a joint letter in September that they did “not yet feel” that GP Connect “can command the confidence of the profession”.
They urged NHS England (NHSE) to “put on hold” the October 1 mandatory switch-on date for the service “until the concerns have been resolved”.
In May, the BMA revealed it was in discussions with NHSE amid concerns that GPs will be “liable” for information entered into patient records by pharmacies.
Read more: BMA: GPs will refer to pharmacies ‘when safe capacity breached’
And in June last year, practices turned off GP Connect functionality en masse after the BMA warned that the update record function “could potentially further enable workload and subtle responsibility transfer from an external provider directly to the GP in the future”.
Meanwhile, GP leaders voted “overwhelmingly” for pharmacy blood pressure checks to be “terminated with immediate effect and the money put into pharmacy dispensing fees” at the conference last year.
