(Time to read: 3 minutes) Recent announcements regarding the employment status of GP locums have caused concern and raised many questions. So Russell Finn, the new medical expert at Harold Sharp, hopes to allay some fears. His article aims to explain in a nutshell the implications for GP practices of employing locums. What has happened?…

NICE (The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) is the independent organisation “responsible for providing national guidance and advice to improve health and social care”. NICE has recently published a new Quality Standard, “Healthy workplaces: improving employee mental and physical health and wellbeing”.

The Accessible Information Standard (AIS), known officially as SCCI1605 Accessible Information, is a new mandatory ‘information standard’ for implementation by all organisations that provide NHS or adult social care – including GP practices – that needs to be in place by 31 July 2016. The Accessible Information Standard aims to ensure that people who have…

Health and Safety legislation imposes a number of duties on employers when providing equipment for employees. This is true whether it’s the “usual” type of equipment you would see in any office or practice or something more specialist, like an orthopaedic chair. Let’s start by examining those duties: Legal duties (1) Basic Duty Section 2…

Auto Enrolment is the result of a piece of Government legislation which became effective in 2012 and is still being rolled out. The purpose of the legislation is to ensure that that every employer auto enrols all ‘eligible jobholders’ into a Qualifying Workplace Pension Scheme (QWPS). This process is called Auto Enrolment. This will affect…

From May, practice managers have another piece of admin to worry about – the Workforce Minimum Data Set (wMDS). All practices in England have been asked to supply data on their staff, including recruitment, vacancies, absences and personal details, such as date of birth, National Insurance number and gender. The intention of this data collection…