With the arrival of a new Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, thoughts always turn to how those on the front-line will be affected by the change. Understandably, the COVID-19 pandemic will dominate Sajid Javid's early days in office – and then there is the mammoth task of integrating the social care system into the health service – but what if, for a moment, we imagine we had 30 seconds with him to give an ‘elevator pitch’ explaining what practice nurses need from him. What would your wish list be?
Top of the list for most people working in health care is likely to be pay. With much focus on the pitiful pay rise for NHS workers after dealing with the pandemic, those working outside of NHS contracts have been forgotten. Something needs to be done about general practice nurse pay, terms and conditions, and the upcoming pay body review will not affect this as practice nurse pay is determined locally or on a practice by practice basis. Change in this area is difficult and can only come from the top. Maybe a review into this topic would be a good place to start.
Perhaps you would like more staff in general practice? Maybe an initiative to encourage more GPs and nurses into primary care? This might fail without alignment with Agenda for Change (or some other intervention to standardise conditions), as we are told time and time again that recruitment into general practice nursing is held back by the lack of consistency with NHS contracts – why would someone want to move to a job with worse maternity pay and sick leave entitlements?
Another important point would be a reminder for the health secretary to simply value general practice. As general practice does approximately 90% of patient contacts, but only receives around 9% of the NHS budget, perhaps it is time to review this and redress this imbalance. General practice cannot keep doing more work, with no additional funds. Valuing general practice does not only mean from a financial perspective. Recent years have seen general practice almost villainised by parts of the media, with accusations of practices being closed throughout the pandemic. This cannot be further from the truth and we need leaders to call these misconceptions out when they occur.
Trying to balance the needs of all stakeholders in the health and social care sector will be difficult. Sajid Javid has lots of experience of high office and dealing with difficult issues, which is a positive, but he needs to make sure he listens to the wide ranging needs of all parts of our health and care system, especially parts that are often forgotten, such as general practice.
What do you think the main focus of the Secretary of State should be? Let us know at pn@markallengroup.com
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