PCT agrees to fund infrastructure upgrade

A primary care trust has agreed to fund replacement servers for practices in its area just days before an arbitration case was due to be heard over its refusal to do so.

Hounslow PCT has written to 18 EMIS practices and two InPractice Systems practices in its area this week to say it has found “a small amount of capital funding” to pay for the upgrades.

The PCT had earlier refused to upgrade the servers which it had identified in its own risk assessment as being in need of replacement. Instead practices were given the choice of continuing with their server or switching to the hosted version of Vision3, the local service provider’s interim offering in London.

Dr Fay Wilson, secretary of Hounslow Local Medical Committee, said the LMC had felt forced to take the issue to the national The nGMS Implementation group, a body which rules on matters of dispute in the new contract between practices and primary care trusts.

She believed it was due to consider the case in the next couple of days.

Dr Wilson told EHI Primary Care: “I believe this is a result for the LMC. We have been telling the PCT for some months that they can’t do this, pointing to the new contract and to system choice but they just pointed to the requirement to balance their books.”

Richard Scowen, applications manager for Hounslow PCT, said the PCT felt it was offering choice by providing the option of a switch to Vision3 or helping to maintain the practices’ existing servers. He said the PCT had only changed its mind when it decided that the interim solution was not ready and that some additional funding had appeared.

He added: “We have had to incur additional costs of £100,000 because we can’t have practices falling over.”

Dr Paul Cundy, joint chair of the joint GP IT Committee of the Royal College of General Practitioners and the BMA’s General Practitioner Committee, says that the committee agreed with Connecting for Health and the national clinical leads that a test case involving Hounslow PCT should be heard because of continuing IT maintenance upgrade funding issues with PCTs.

Problems over IT funding have led some GPs to consider investing their own money again, as was the case prior to the new contract.

Dr Alun Price, a GP in Chesterfield, told EHI Primary Care that his reception staff were currently struggling with computers that were too slow and that he would have no hesitation in replacing them himself.

He added: “Our PCT comes along and looks at our equipment and says it’s alright but alright really isn’t good enough. They are massively slow and it’s driving our reception staff bonkers.”