Dear colleagues,
On the day of our June meeting, I had lost my voice: the meeting was ably chaired by co-vice chair Alex Armstrong. Our other co-vice chair is Gerard McHale. He was also one of our delegates to the LMC UK Conference, where he was elected to represent GPs both at the Annual Representative Meeting (ARM), of the BMA and to join me on the General Practitioners Committee (GPC) of the BMA. We congratulated him! The GPC roadshow is coming to London on 13th June 2024 and you should all have received invitations from Londonwide, and all practices have also been emailed by individual committee members. We anticipate an exciting and informative event.
Our meeting with commissioners came before the scale and risk of the cyber-attack on Synnovis had become fully apparent, but in the light of recent failures by the service we made clear our anxiety about the risks to our patients. We also discussed other digital and interface problems. Following the management costs reduction exercise, the ICB teams are smaller. Nevertheless, we have made it clear that we expect them to participate in Q1 reviews of our local contracts. Public Health Commissioners have already committed to this, and we have asked them to send us possible dates.
Please be sure that we are asking the questions you need to know about, regarding mitigations for the failure of pathology services.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Penelope Jarrett
Chair
Lambeth LMC