Locum agency Primary Care People (PCP) has pledged to clear all outstanding payments to GPs ‘within weeks’ after securing a rescue deal yesterday.
The company had been forced to place its payment arm, Evolve Resources Ltd, under administration earlier this month after ‘cash-flow issues’ related to changes to its payment system.
Pulse revealed last month that around 70 GPs had payments overdue and had enlisted professional debt collection agencies to retrieve the debt.
But yesterday the company administrators reached a deal to sell the business and assets of the company, securing new finance to pay off the locums.
The deal will see PCP continuing trading under the ownership of recruitment consultancy firm the McGinley Group.
PCP managing director Tawhid Juneja told Pulse yesterday evening: ‘It’s all been signed, sealed, done today. We are going through all the backlogs on GP payments now, and we will be making all of those payments in the coming weeks.’
GPs that are currently working for the company ‘will be prioritised’ because they ‘don’t want to risk more GPs leaving their jobs’, he added, but he said ‘every single GP’ will be ‘up to date’ on their payments ‘in the coming weeks’.
As Pulse reported last month, PCP recently began paying all GPs directly, when many had previously been paid by the practice, in response to new tax rules.
But they had run into problems when incoming payments from practices were received much more slowly than the weekly payments they had committed to making to locums.
Mr Juneja said: ‘Restrictive funding to meet the weekly GP payments was the stimulus causing cash-flow issues, however this led to an increase in of overdue invoices. The McGinley Group has pledged to bring all GP payment up to date.’
FRP Advisory, the administrators for Evolve Resources Ltd, said in a statement released yesterday that it had ‘sold out of administration the business and assets of Evolve Resource Solutions Ltd, (“Evolve Resource” or “the Company”), the national recruitment agency specialising in the care sector and trading as Primary Care People to PCP International Limited, (“Newco” or “PCP”), ensuring a continuity of trading and securing all 23 jobs’.
It added: ‘The sale to PCP ensures a continuity of trading for the Stevenage-based recruitment business which continues to handle the placement of general practitioner (“GP”) doctors, nurses, pharmacists and a range of other health professionals.’
