GPs will receive no additional funding for the entry of patient records to the NHS Care Records Service (NCRS) or to correct coding conversion errors, according to a government health minister.
Liam Byrne, junior health minister with responsibility for social care , said in a written parliamentary answer last week that GPs were already funded to maintain adequate patient records through their new contract via the global sum and the Quality and Outcomes Framework.
He added: “There are no current plans to provide additional financial support to general practitioners specifically for entry of patients’ records on the national health service care records service.”
Byrne was responding to a question from Ian Taylor MP, vice chairman of the Parliamentary Information and Technology Committee, who had asked what funding the Department of Health would make available to GPs for the entry of records to the NCRS and what contingency plans were to be put in place for errors in code conversions from GP records to the database.
In response Byrne said that good practice guidelines from the General Practitioners Committee (GPC) and the Royal College of General Practitioners made it clear that responsibility for the quality of the nescessary transfers and for ensuring information was accurate and up-to-date lay with individual practices.
He added: “This includes the putting in place of procedures to identify and resolve where an error occurs in code conversion. That could be as simple as reviewing and verifying the relevant record with the patient at the next consultation.”
In December the GPC and NHS Employers annnounced that from April this year GPs would be able to receive funding via a directed enhanced service (DES) for IM&T work, an elemnt of which would be for getting practices ready for IT developments, particularly those practices that want to go, or have already gone, ‘paperlite.’ Details of the DES are still under negotiation although it was also announced last week that GP2GP record transfers would be excluded from it for this yea.
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