LMCs worry about “imminent” end of GPSoC

Many practices will be left without an adequate IT system if a credible replacement for GPSoC is not agreed soon, Local Medical Committees will hear today.

Concern about the “imminent demise” of GP Systems of Choice in April 2013, and the apparent lack of a replacement, will be discussed at the Local Medical Committee conference in Liverpool.

A number of LMCs have submitted motions for debate about GPSoC, saying the uncertainty about its future is unhelpful to both practices and suppliers and that the tight time scale risks leaving many practices without an “adequately modernised IT system.”

The agenda committee has put forward a motion to establish a “clear strategy for central investment in general practice IT” and ensure ongoing freedom of choice for practices to choose or change a clinical system.

Joint chairman of the BMA and RCGP’s joint IT committee, Dr Paul Cundy, told eHealth Insider that the committee is working with NHS Connecting for Health and GPSoC on developing a successor.

“We are going through the motions of trying to establish what’s going to happen,” he said. “We are inputting into the national IT requirements, drawing on a wish list of what we would like to see developed next.

“Unfortunately, we haven’t got clarity yet around where IT will lie – with clinical commissioning groups or the NHS Commissioning Board. It’s fairly clear what we don’t want, which is for it all to be at CCG level.”

Dr Cundy said there was also no clarity as yet on funding for the programme. “We are supporting CfH in their bid to have GPSoC version 2 approved and signed off,” he explained.

“If they [the government] don’t continue to support GP IT, then the entirety of the NHS reforms stop and we all go back to being electronic islands again.”

There was no mention of GPSoC in the NHS information strategy that finally emerged at the start of the week, even though it makes a number of commitments to give patients access to transactional services and to see their GP records online.

Read more GP reaction to the information strategy in Insight.