Emergency Caretaker Primary Care Service Provision

Medina Medical Centre is a single-handed GP practice with 6,000+ registered patients in Dallow Ward, Luton. Following an inspection by the Care Quality Commission (CQC), enforcement action was issued against the practice. Consequently, Medina Medical Centre was formally served a Notice of Decision to suspend the Practice's registration for an initial period of four months, as of 27th September 2018, under section 31 of the Health & Social Care Act, 2008. Due to the suspension of the Medina Medical Centre's CQC registration NHS Luton Clinical Commissioning Group (LCCG) were required to identify an Emergency Caretaker provider to deliver services with immediate effect, covering the duration of the suspension period.

A competitive process was undertaken whereby all existing LCCG member GP Primary care practices were asked for Expressions of Interest to provide caretaker services from The Medina Medical Centre site for an initial period of 4 months.

The successful provider Practice will be required to provide all essential primary care services including Direct Enhanced Services, Home Visits and any other additional services as deemed appropriate throughout the core hours as determined in the NHS General Medical Services Regulations 2004 and subsequent amendments. The successful Contractor will be expected to maintain the current service provision throughout core hours of 08:00am - 6:30pm and that GP/nurse appointments will be made available across all sessions.

All primary medical service providers are required to be registered with the CQC.

Additional information: There is a possibility that the contract may be extended, subject and dependent upon Care Quality Commission (CQC) requirements. The CQC is the independent regulator of health and adult social care in England. It seeks to ensure services are safe, effective, and compassionate and delivered to a high quality, encouraging services to improve. The inspection of general practice includes five key questions of services i.e. whether services are: safe, effective, caring, responsive to people's needs and well-led. CQC rates each of the five questions to give an overall rating for a practice, the rating categories used include: Outstanding, good, requires improvement and inadequate. These ratings and practice reports are available on the CQC website.

The successful provider will provide a multi-disciplinary service led and supported by GPs, as part of the integrated service delivery. The provider will provide sufficient capacity as regards appointments and skill-mix across core hours and must:

a) commence treatment of patients potentially suffering from immediate and life-threatening conditions as soon as they present to the Practice b) ensure emergency GP appointments are made available on the same day, where clinically indicated; c) ensure appointment lengths are tailored to meet the clinical needs of patients. d) ensure a routine/non-urgent GP appointment is made available. e) ensure a routine/non-urgent appointment with a nurse or any appropriate Health Care Professional. f) provide urgent /non urgent phlebotomy appointments via the Local Phlebotomy Service and claim via the providers existing phlebotomy service. g) provide appointments that can be booked in advance. h) ensure patients are able to book and cancel appointments on-line; i) ensure patients are able to request and repeat prescriptions within 3 working days, including a facility to request repeats on-line; j) provide access for patients to co-located services within the health community, e.g. the community nursing service; k) A Provider must ensure that for each of its registered patients (including those patients under the age of 16) there is assigned an accountable GP.

Inclusion in list of patients: armed forces personnel: The Provider may, if its list of patients is open, include a serving member of the armed forces of the Crown who has received written authorisation from Defence Medical Services to receive primary medical services from the Provider's practice; and living or working within the Provider's practice area during the period in respect of which that written authorisation is given.