MEDICOLEGAL FEATURE


SESSIONAL GP | VOLUME 3 | ISSUE 2 | 2011 | UNITED KINGDOM www.mps.org.uk


© RICHARD WALKER


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A collective battering ram Collectively employing staff and nominating several amongst them to be clinical directors and chambers leads, and some as ‘partners’ with a specialist portfolio (eg, prescribing), will allow for robust systems to be developed for managing significant events and


Useful links


■■ MPS factsheets, Repeat prescribing for GPs – www.medicalprotection.org/uk/uk-factsheets/ repeat-prescribing-for-GPs


sharing feedback. This level of organisation fosters a sense of quality and reliability, such that they can work at positioning themselves as the preferred provider of locums to local surgeries. As a large body of local


GPs with power, chambers can collectively challenge behaviour, demand changes, take sanctions, and place


themselves in a very strong negotiating position to significantly change the clinical environment within which local locums (both chambers locums and other non-chambers locums) can practise in a safe environment. If a chambers member


has a bad time at a practice, chambers such as the one I belong to do not just walk away. Chambers can make sure that the risk that their members are


exposed to is removed so that subsequent locums can practise safely in the future. The practices that


employ the locums from our chambers know that our members are unlikely to sign repeats, see more patients than are safe, or be taken for any sort of ride or exploited. By compromising this relationship the practices know that they will lose their supply – their lifeline – of good locums.


Dr Fieldhouse is the founder of the National Association of Sessional GPs (NASGP) and is Clinical Director at Pallant Medical Chambers.


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