Minutes of Meeting –30 May 2007
Meeting of Primary Care Support Agency /Management Board
Held on Wednesday 30 May 2007 at 10.30am
in Meeting Room C, King Square House
Bath & North East Somerset PCT to Chair
Minutes
Present: / Julia Griffith (JG), in the Chair, Bath & North East Somerset PCTJessica Wilson (JW), Bristol PCT
Ann Van Vliet (AVV), North Somerset PCT
Julie Cooper (JC), General Manager, Avon Primary Care Support Agency
Ian Skinner, Finance, Bristol South & West PCT
In attendance: / Helen Bond, APCSA (Notetaker)
1Apologies
Trevor Foster, Avon IM&T Consortium
Lynda Dando, South Gloucestershire PCT
2Minutes of Previous Meeting (28.03.07)
All members agreed that they were an accurate record.
3Matters Arising
Agenda Item 5.2 – Primary Care Training & Development
See agenda Item 5.2
Agenda Item 7 – Risk Register
See agenda Item 7
Agenda Item 8 – Performance Reports
See agenda item 8
Agenda Item 14 – National Programme for IT
See agenda item 14
4SLA
4.1 Updating of Service Level Agreement following PCT reconfiguration and for 07/08
To date no SLA’s have been signed off. Each PCTs will investigate. HB to circulate final SLA to AVV.
Action PCTs/HB
4.2 Annual Report for 2006/7
JC advised the group that all but 7% of the Primary Care Training and Development Budget has been spent for 06/07, however 28% related to commissioning towards the end of the year. Effectively this means that 35% of the budget wasn’t utilised and delivered fully in 07/08. This has resulted in numbers of delegates being lower than previous years.
JC added that Agenda for Change (AFC) has made this a difficult year. Many staff felt discontentment with their results and the agreed process that was followed. Meetings are being arranged with the AFC team.
5Finance
5.1 Finance Report (Bristol PCT)
IS reported that a sum of £50,433 was not accrued against Conferences and Seminars (Primary Care Training & Development) due to an error in financial processing. This sum will need to be re-charged to PCTs in addition to the SLA cost. This will be detailed in PCSA budgets for 07/08.
IS agreed to e-mail PCT finance colleagues to advise them of this.
Action IS
JC added that the underspend was due to delays in recruitment, no external audit charges and lower than expected accommodation costs.
5.2 Primary Care Training & Development
JC confirmed that a draft letter that PCTs could use to send to their GP Practices was circulated (the LMC were asked for comment before it was sent). JC reported that all PCTs had sent these letters by 3 May 2007. There has been very little feedback from GP practices.
JC advised the group that Sue Graham, Primary Care Training and Development Manager will provide an annual report detailing both budget and spend to the LMC. This will also include the Nurse Training Budget.
JC explained the following proposal regarding the budget and members accepted the proposal.
The £8K already held by Bristol PCT for admin support does not need to be added to the £167,200 as this is the budget for 07/08 with all of the historic inflators added.This means that Bristol PCT needs to share this £8K between the four PCTs. Instead of doing this it is proposed that Bristol PCT make good the Nurse Training Budget by increasing it from the current £36.8K to £43K.As there is inequity between the charging out of the Primary Care Training and Development Budget and the Nurse Training budget it is then proposed to devolve the 43K Nurse Training budget back to PCTs. The £43K can then be shown as a single budget line on cost centre A46744 and the whole cost centre recharged to PCTs using the same values as the PCSA SLA.
JC confirmed that the Primary Care Training and Development manager post has moved to the provider unit with effect from 1 April 2007.
6Update on PCSA staff resource issues/workload issues
JC reported on current vacancies and explained that some posts are being assessed for the need to replace like for like because of the changing work patterns.
JC advised the group that the vacancy for a job-share Contracts Officer has been put on hold. Currently there is one-job share partner working 22.5 hours per week and the workload is manageable. This will continue to be monitored. Two band 2 posts have recently been filled, one in Patient Data and one in Contractor Payments.
7Risk Register
It was noted that the risk register has decreased and that those items still listed are those that remain a constant risk.
At the last meeting JC agreed that she would address her concerns regarding the gradual transfer of KSH central services to individual teams to Keith Farley, Head of Estates, Bristol PCT. JC reported that the KSH accommodation review has superseded this. As a tenant she has fed requirements for PCSA into the review and highlighted concerns over tenancy agreements and service levels. The accommodation review is to conclude in July 07.
8Performance Reports
JG requested that the PCT registered population is added to the workload volume report.
Action JC
9Dental
Nothing to report.
10Pharmaceutical
JC advised the group that despite no pharmaceutical oral hearings for many years, there are now six hearings that have taken/are to take place.There are 3 in Bristol PCT, 1 in BaNES PCT, and 2 in South Gloucestershire PCT.JC advised the group that she is collating data to assess the costs of managing these hearings. Apart from staff time there are costs for refreshments, taxis and photo-copying.
JC reported that, as a result of recent pharmaceutical applications, South Gloucestershire PCT has requested that the rurality of three areas be considered. The PCT have also asked if PCSA can also consider rurality of the areas surrounding GP Dispensing Practices if the rurality has not been considered in the previous 5 years. PCSA will need to build this into work plans. JC asked if other PCTs would also wish this to happen? The PCTs confirmed they would.
JC said that PCSA continue to be involved in meetings to discuss the monitoring of Home Oxygen. This is being led, on behalf of all PCTs, by Kate Hulme, Commissioning Manager for Bristol PCT. Currently PCSA are the contact point for the receipt of all Home Oxygen Order Forms (HOOFs). These forms are not being entered on a database though. Avon IM & T Consoritum have given a demonstration of a product being developed by NHS Connecting for Health to provide a national solution. Locally we have agreed that this is the way forward and Kate will be providing feedback to developers to ensure the solution meets all of the PCT requirements. Basically data received from BOC each month will be uploaded onto the new system and this will be compared to data on the Exeter system to validate invoices. Timescales for delivery aren’t yet known.
11.Ophthalmics
JC informed the group that the audit committee have advised that the audit of ophthalmic claims should continue at present.
12Screening update
The pilot with Synertec sending out invitation letters for a cervical screening test went live on 14 May 2007. All is going well and PCSA is pleased with the quality of letters being sent which are a great improvement on letters produced using in-house printers.
The NHS Purchasing Consortium has informed JC that they will be sending out Pre Qualification Documentation to those that have expressed and interest in the full contract hopefully beginning in October 2007.
13PCT News
Nothing to report.
14National Programme for IT
JC reported at the last meeting that NHS Connecting for Health had predicted that an extra 88 WTE staff across the 82 Agencies may be required for implementation of Phase 2 of the Personal Demographics Service (PDS) Project. For Avon this equated to 5 WTE based on the turnover of the population. Phase 2 requires more tracing at a local level. JC agreed to find out why resource was not being transferred to a local level also. JC said that NHS Connecting for Health had responded to say that they had no answer to this. Their only suggestion is that it is discussed with Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs). JC added that NHS Connecting for Health were inviting the Chief Information Officers for the three Strategic Health Authorities to the next Southern Cluster NHAIS (Exeter system) migration meeting. It was acknowledged that in any circumstance moving resources is very difficult and in many cases does not come to fruition.
JC reported that Phase 2 of the PDS commenced on 11 May 2007. The software is working well and as expected. Processing new patient registrations is taking more time as tracing previous NHS numbers is extensive and very often requires Patient Data to contact the GP Practice for additional information. A good practice guide for registering patients has recently been issued to all GP Practices in Avon to raise the importance of gathering as much information from patients as possible and data quality.
JC reported that there is still no strategy for GP Payments or Screening and reminded members that until these two areas are migrated the Exeter system will still be required.
15Review of procedures for dealing with Registration and Assignment of Patients and Closed Lists
JC advised the group that historical references and the recommendation that Chief Executives from Bristol PCT and North Somerset PCT would sit on each others Assessment Panel have been removed in addition to grammatical/process errors being corrected (process for changing practice boundaries).
JC asked the group if they felt paragraph 2.1 should be amended. She asked if the group felt that the ‘just cause’ reason for refusing to accept a patient should have the example amended to read ‘eg. a history of violence against your practice’?. The group agreed this.
JC confirmed that updated procedures will be circulated to Board members, Avon LMC and Avon GP Practices.
Action JC
16 Procedures for Payment of locum costs
JC explained that although the review date for these procedures is not until July 2007 recent precedents have been set by Bristol PCT. PCTs were asked if these precedents should be added to the procedures. The group discussed this and felt that circumstances were different for every GP practice and therefore it was still appropriate to consider each case on it’s own merits. The procedures will therefore remain unchanged.
JC will feed this back to the PCT Finance Group and circulate the procedures to Board members, Avon LMC, and Avon GP practices.
Action JC
17 Any other Business
JC asked if PCTs give guidance to GP Practices regarding their automated telephone answering services. Very often callers have to go through a number of selections. Some give advice on what to do for an emergency straight away others leave this until the last option. PCTs said that this is not monitored routinely but if there are concerns about any messages these should be fed back to the appropriate PCT.
18Date, time and Venue of next meeting:
Wednesday 25 July07 – 10.30am
Room C, King Square House, North Somerset PCT to Chair
Minutes Page 1 of 5