BMA response to Seasonal Flu Vaccine Procurement Consultation

In this response to the DoH consultation on the review of seasonal flu vaccine, the BMA have highlighted their concerns about the proposals to move to central procurement of seasonal flu vaccines in England. The BMA believe that GPs should retain the right to procure the seasonal flu vaccine, but that the system could be improved by allowing practices and PCTs to share vaccines, and for emergency stocks to be available to be called on if necessary. They were also concerned about the lack of evidence that central procurement would improve vaccination uptake in England.

Emis System Failure

On Thursday 18 August (morning) there was a failure of the EMIS clinical system. Sean Riddell, EMIS Managing Director, made the following statement:

‘On Thursday 18th August 2011 EMIS had a series of hardware failures resulting in an outage at its data centre. This caused some performance and stability issues at 333 GP practices out of a total UK user base of 5,496 NHS UK customers. Unfortunately this problem had knock on effects to a further 446 GP practices at 11.50am. Our software engineers worked in conjunction with the suppliers of our data centre hardware throughout this period to restore performance. The data centre commenced normal operation shortly after 1pm and practices then began coming back online. EMIS have not identified any data loss resulting from this issue.

Our first priority at EMIS is and always has been our users and their patients. We recognise the vital role that EMIS systems play in the efficient running of GP practices, and we apologise to affected users for this regrettable disruption to service’.

Practices are reminded that contingency plans need to be in place for dealing with system failures. The Good Practice Guidelines for GP electronic patient records v4 (2011) include guidance for unplanned downtime in section 9.4.3.2 (page 157).

NHS Community Pharmacy Contractual Framework: New Medicine Service

The Professional Relationships Working Group (PRWG), which is a forum between the GPC, pharmacists and NHSE, has published this briefing for GP practices outlining the changes to the pharmacy contract, including the introduction of a New Medicine Service (NMS) and a nationally targeted Medicines Use Reviews (MURs). This is to help GP practices get up to speed on how the services will work from their implementation on 1 October 2011. The working group has also published a New Medicine Service (NMS) feedback form, which is designed to support the process by providing a practical channel that pharmacists can use to exchange information with GPs, by sending the form back to a GP practice if they have identified a problem which requires the prescriber to review a prescription.