PCTs must monitor out-of-hours care, say MPs

8 Apr 10
Some primary care trusts are failing in their responsibility to set and monitor the standards of out-of-hours care providers, MPs said this week.
By Vivienne Russell

8 April 2010

Some primary care trusts are failing in their responsibility to set and monitor the standards of out-of-hours care providers, MPs said this week.

An inquiry by the Commons health select committee into out-of-hours care said that PCT’s contracts with providers must set out standards for quality, clinical governance and risk management.

The report, published on April 8, also urged strategic health authorities and the Care Quality Commission to do more to ensure that PCTs were securing quality services.

The inquiry was conducted in response to the death in 2008 of David Gray, who was given a fatal dose of diamorphine by a German locum, employed by a private company contracted by NHS Cambridgeshire.

The MPs’ report called for immediate improvements in the vetting of overseas doctors providing out-of-hours care in the UK.

Chair Kevin Barron said: ‘It is tragic that it takes the death of a patient to expose the serious failings now evident in the current system for checking the language and competence skills of overseas doctors.’

A Department of Health spokesman said: ‘The recent report into GP out-of-hours services by Dr David Colin-Thome and Professor Steve Field showed that there was  variation in how PCTs commission and ensure delivery of out-of-hours services. All the recommendations made in the Colin-Thome/Field report were accepted in full. These will tighten existing controls and ensure that out-of-hours providers are employing competent clinicians.’

By April 2012, every provider of GP health care, including out-of-hours providers, will need to be registered with the CQC and will be subject to checks on compliance, the spokesman added.

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