NHS England is likely to avoid new conflicts over GP contracts and concentrate on recruitment, its new head of primary care has said.

Dr Amanda Doyle, director of primary care at NHS England, told MPs yesterday that there would not be a “big bang” to rip up the contract and start again. She spoke after the British Medical Association conference voted for tough action in protest at recent contractual changes. The BMA’s vote included a call for practices to withdraw from primary care networks.

Dr Doyle told MPs: “We need a mix of evolution and revolution. We can’t have a big bang where we rip up and start again. But there are opportunities each year as we discuss changes to the contract and to look at things we might want to put in place. There is an opportunity to say, ‘how do we fit integrated neighbourhood teams, primary care networks and a much larger skill mix in primary care’? How do we contract for what we want to see? GPs themselves want a relationship with patients which has continuity… but it is in the current situation where we are struggling to retain GPs in the numbers that we need in the workforce that it is very, very difficult to deliver through a contractual route.”

She also promised that NHS England had no plans to shift general practice away from partnerships.
She said: “We have no policy to scrap the partnership model,” she said, adding that the issues facing the profession affect partners as well as salaried doctors. “It’s important we retain all our GPs, so we don’t want to do anything that is going to lead to a greater loss of GPs from the workforce.”