GPs advised to negotiate on IT service level agreements

A GP national user group has advised its members to negotiate over the service level agreements included in the primary care trust-practice agreement for GP Systems of Choice.

Dr Charlie Stuart-Buttle, chairman of the EMIS National User Group, told its annual conference last week to sign the PCT-practice agreement – but to negotiate over SLAs.

He said: “The level of service your PCT provides in the future is in your hands to negotiate.” Dr Stuart-Buttle said practices should consider issues such as whether they would be happy with a PCT helpdesk, or whether they would want to be able to call the EMIS support desk directly.

He added: “In parts of the country there are well-designed, mature helpdesks and locally practices are very happy with those. Other PCTs can’t imagine why they should want to take EMIS software calls. Make sure that, whatever support is in place, you can make a single call about a problem.”

EMIS and the NUG have issued a joint statement highlighting plans by PCTs to set up local helpdesks.

Richard Wilson, general manager of software support services for EMIS, said a concern was that some areas planned to triage all calls to the EMIS service desk. He said this would result in a reduction of service to EMIS users.

He added: “Figures are already indicating that the new set up adds significant additional delay to the resolution of EMIS issues. Despite our concerns, some PCTs are blindly pressing on with this policy.”

Dr Stuart-Buttle said the main part of the PCT-practice agreement was non-negotiable but told practices it was in their interests to sign the agreement to benefit from the protection it offered.

He added: “The PCT-practice agreement has caused a bit of disquiet. The NUG was part of the negotiations for this and we believe this is as good as we could have got.”

Dr Manpreet Pujara, joint national GP clinical lead for NHS Connecting for Health, also urged NUG members to sign the agreement and to ask PCTs what they were doing with the money saved through GPSoC central funding.

He said: “It’s for you to encourage your PCT to spend that money wisely on other issues that you might have, such as in document management systems.”

Dr Pujara said the national GP clinical leads wanted to see document management systems included as a core component of GPSoC so that they could be funded nationally and not subject to local PCT funding policies.

See also: GP practices urged to sign GPSoC deals