Payment for the pneuomoccal polysaccharide vaccination programme will be delayed by a month this year, and will be paid in August instead of July.
The Health and Social Care Information Centre said that it was piloting a scheme that means practices will no longer have to enter the data manually.
A note from the HSCIC said: ’The Pneumococcal polysaccharide vaccination programme 2016/17 is one of the quality services included in the new 2016/17 GPES pilot programme. This programme entails trialling Quality Service collections using live data and practice feedback to identify and correct issues prior to carrying out a full data collection.’
But it added that ’because the number of claims in the first four months of the year is low’, it was collecting two months’ data in one go.
The note continued: ’This means that the payment will be made in August 2016, as opposed to July 2016. This decision has been made between NHS Employers, the GP Committee and NHS England so that practices do not need to undertake the additional workload associated with manual entry.’
Dr Richard Vautrey, deputy chair of the GPC, told Pulse: ‘Practices will be frustrated that yet again NHS IT systems are letting them down. To reduce the workload pressures we have agreed with NHS England and NHS Employers that it is better to wait until the automatic extraction in July for this data rather than add a further burden of manual data collection on already busy practice staff.’
