A resolution has now been reached and practices should hear from their respective contract manager soon if they are considered in the at-risk group. We strongly recommend that affected practices don’t wait, however, and write to their health board contract managers to set the fix in motion at the earliest opportunity. We can advise members about the best way to do this for your specific needs.
The 75% target for historic patients is a minimum threshold of delivery for the historic patient target before any underperformance on that metric can be offset against over delivery on the new patient metric. This target had been retrospectively imposed by Local Health Boards (LHBs) long after the original offer from Welsh Government and after the original letter of intent for contract variation had been sent from LHBs.
If this target had been carried through to the end of the financial year, then in our estimation significant clawback would have been inevitable for at least 70 practices around Wales. These practices have insufficient historic patients on their books and would be bound to suffer clawback if LHBs didn’t change the targets. Setting up practices to fail is counter to contract law and we were clear this needed to be fought against.
We have been in detailed discussions with government officials over several months to seek a resolution to the retrospectively imposed targets, preferably without the need for a legal challenge. Thankfully, we have won the argument, and Welsh Government has given a new directive to LHBs that they must resolve this situation with all affected practices immediately. It has been made clear that failure to do so could risk disengagement.
We were able to deal with this issue because members raised it with us, so please contact us if there are problems. We need to know if Health Boards are not cooperating so that we can take appropriate action.
With another year of contract variation in prospect, we will be keeping any contract variation offer that Welsh Government formulates for the 2025-26 financial year in close review. Our members can be assured that, although we are still in contract negotiations, these will not impede us from dealing with the current issues affecting practices.
