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Scottish GPs to debate rescue package for general practice

Scottish GPs are to debate whether Scotland needs its own General Practice Forward View, following NHS England’s rescue package for general practice.

Coming together at the Pulse Live conference in Edinburgh on Tuesday, delegates will make their views known on whether similar measures are required.

The package for England, announced last month, will see general practice receive £2.4bn extra funding a year by 2020 for general practice, and a £508m rescue package over five years.

RCGP Scotland chair Dr Miles Mack has called for political parties in Scotland to ‘urgently’ replicate what ‘has happened south of the border’, where he said the Government was no longer ‘in denial’ about the state of general practice.

The Pulse Live conference will also see Scottish GPC chair Dr Alan McDevitt run delegates through what the new GP contract for Scotland, due to come into force from April 2017, will entail.

The plans are expected to see GPs in Scotland quit employing their own staff and take a clinical leadership role in community teams.