Dear colleague,
Chair’s introduction
Tower Hamlets LMC is the voice of general practice in Tower Hamlets and I am delighted to have been elected chair of the new committee. We will do our best to represent you over the next three years. There has never been a more uncertain time for general practice and some of these anxieties were expressed at the recent GP Forum/ curry night. However, I came away from that evening feeling positive about how united and committed we all our in our mission to protect general practice in order to serve the patients of Tower Hamlets.
We must ensure that general practice really is the ‘cornerstone’ of the neighbourhoods and locally we are in a good position to do this with our well established networks, strong leadership and a large federation which is there to support us.
I have been shocked by the plans to remove nearly all of our local clinical leads and Place-based commissioners in the ICB restructure. Tower Hamlets has benefited from extremely strong leadership and the huge wealth of experience that these individuals have developed. I would like to thank all those who have committed a significant proportion of their careers to this work and I really hope the skills and knowledge of these individuals can be utilised in the future for the benefit of Tower Hamlets General Practice and patients.
This newsletter gives a flavour of what we’ve been up to but by no means is it a comprehensive summary of everything your LMC has been doing.
I hope you have a good Christmas break and I look forward to working with you all in the New Year.
Tower Hamlets LMC Membership and Contact info
New LMC membership
There have been several new members elected and co-opted to the LMC this summer and autumn. Welcome to Dr Natalie Blavo, Dr Ana Cuadrado, Dr Frances Germain, Dr Amer Mujkanovic, Dr Ona Riamah, Dr Tom Round, Dr Sophie von Heimendahl and (returning to the LMC after a break) Dr Nirupam Talukder. We also have a new Practice Manager rep, Mohammed Sabry. They join continuing members Dr Gemma Eyres, Dr Kate Nicholson (Vice-Chair), Dr Archana Patel, Dr Emma Radcliffe (Chair), and Practice Nurse rep Rachel McCredie.
Farewell
We say goodbye with thanks to LMC members stepping down Dr Melvyn Adjei, Dr Raoul Li-Everington, Dr Sophie Osbourne, Dr Selva Selvarajah, PM rep Beverly Fernando, and especially to Dr Jackie Applebee, who chaired the LMC for a decade with great energy and humanity, and championed general practice in Tower Hamlets.
What has Tower Hamlets LMC been working on recently?
Secondary interface
We continue to meet regularly with local partners such as Barts Health and ELFT. In line with national guidance we have been focusing on secondary care production of sick notes, ensuring that referrals are done as part of ‘complete care’ and having contact details available for all departments. It’s a work in progress. We are very keen to develop a document such as this.
Quality alerts remain an important part of monitoring workload transfer so please do ensure you fill them out as often as possible. More information here.
MSK update
We were deeply disappointed that the ICB went ahead with their plan to stop GP access to MRIs despite not meeting the agreed waiting times for the new service. We will continue to monitor waiting times for both routine and urgent referrals; and advocate for appropriately trained clinicians (e.g. FCPs) to re-gain access. We are formally writing to the commissioner to re-state our concerns about this decision.
Anticoagulation LES and shared care
The LMC has raised concerns about the process leading to the withdrawal of our current LES. We believe our patients were well served by local practices doing their warfarin monitoring. Our patients will be the biggest losers and we have had no assurance from the ICB that they were consulted about the changes.
As the LES also contained elements of DOAC monitoring and initiation. This DOAC work is no longer funded so we would like all practices to consider whether they should continue this unfunded work unless the ICB produce a LES which covers this. Other ICBs elsewhere in the country are paying GPs to do this work. Likewise, many shared care drugs e.g. methotrexate and azathioprine have LESs which support the considerable work required for monitoring. We continue to make the argument for funded share care but we are unlikely to win unless the cost implications of NOT funding this work are highlighted to commissioners.
Public Health LES
Public Health are implementing a package of tariff uplifts across NHS Health Checks, Sexual Health and Substance Misuse services to better reflect current workload and ensure practices are paid for activity actually delivered. Overall, these changes represent an additional investment of around £126k per year and are designed to support sustainability of provision and incentivise delivery where need is greatest.
North East London sector issues
Many issues affecting Tower Hamlets are sector-wide and we work closely with our counterparts in other boroughs. There is also a newsletter for the sector work – the November issue covered issues including MAAR charts, antenatal prescriptions, same-day emergency care, the community pharmacy project and Londonwide LMCs’ refreshed Buying Group for general practice. You can read it here.
Refreshed Londonwide LMCs Buying Group
Our substantially updated Buying Group offer is now live, bringing high quality products, service, opportunities and offers to London general practice at the best prices and with the best possible deals.
The offer now includes a supplier for each of these areas: consumables, insurance, training and practice support and wellbeing (including free and discounted tickets to music, theatre and sports events). In addition, we have four suppliers for digital and tech services covering: cloud telephony, records digitisation, call-and-recall automation and patient registration automation.
Tower Hamlets LMC
You can find contact information, meeting dates and membership information for Tower Hamlets LMC here.
Yours faithfully,
Dr Emma Radcliffe, Chair, Tower Hamlets LMC