Important Londonwide CEO message number 14 - 21 July 2009

More on bureaucracy causing increased work.

Vouchers vs FP10s

Since yesterday a number of you will have received limited numbers of Tamiflu vouchers to issue to patients. Some PCTs are under the misapprehension that regulations have been changed to force GPs to use these vouchers instead of the annotated FP10s which are currently being used by practices across London under our agreement with NHS London.

Please understand that to date no such regulation change has been agreed by the GPC, RCGP or other professional body, nor has any change to the regulations been laid before parliament. You are therefore operating within the regulations and your current contracts by continuing to use annotated FP10s when prescribing Tamiflu or Relenza.

To reiterate, we believe vouchers, while wholly appropriate for flu centres themselves, are wholly inappropriate for GP prescribers on safety and best-practice grounds since:

a)    They take us back to the Stone Age in terms of prescribing
b)    There will not be a computer audit trail of date, dose etc.
c)    Hand writing the prescriptions will lead to errors
d)    hand writing the prescriptions will mean that they can more easily be altered by patients
e)    Due to them being gummed even using practice produced templates they cannot be consistently printed.

Flucon/Sitrep

I promised to get back to those of you expressing concern about some PCTs’ method of complying with their requirement to assess demand and adjust their planning. The bottom line here is that while different PCTs are doing things differently, all are trying to help not hinder us in terms of making resource available. My view on this is therefore that this piece of bureaucracy is one to tolerate for now.