Issue - meetings

[Report of the Director for Public Health. To be introduced by the Cabinet Member for Finance and Health.]Award of contract for prevention services delivered through the GP practices.

The Cabinet Member for Finance and Health introduced the report which sought agreement to establish a Framework for the provision of enhanced services (the “Framework”) and to award contracts to designated General Practices (GPs) for one or all of the following; health checks: stop smoking service, long acting reversible contraception (LARC) and shared care/opiate substitute prescribing (OSP), GP with special interest for substance misuse (GPSI), GP lead sexual health, GP lead making every contact count (MECC).

RESOLVED

1.    That Cabinet agrees to establish the Framework and to award contracts as described in 1.1 above to GPs in accordance with Contract Standing Orders (CSO) 9.07.1(d).

2. That the contracts will be awarded under the Framework for a period of 4 years to the GPs listed in the table in paragraph 6.19.6 of the report.

Reasons for decision

The Council has a statutory responsibility to deliver health checks and sexual and reproductive health services. These and the other services are essential elements in meeting the Council’s health improvement targets.

Alternative options considered

                 The public health team considered providing these services just through existing providers. However there is evidence regarding the advantage of using GPs: National Institute of Clinical Excellence (NICE) evidence suggests that GPs are positioned to use routine appointments to deliver brief interventions around quitting and practice nurses to providing rapid access to a service. ^[1] NICE recommends using GPs to deliver OSP service as a way of de stigmatising this service.^[2] For LARC the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Health recommends increasing the uptake of LARC and use of GPs to achieve this. ^[3]

It is also more cost effective to use GPs to provide these services i.e. cost per patient per year in a specialist drug service is £1825 compared to £1199 in primary care, LARC in clinic costs £150 and in a GP it costs £82.