First GP consortia to get management fee of £1.66 a head

By Ian Quinn

Exclusive: GP pathfinder consortia will be paid £1.66 a year per registered patient as management support, under the first details to emerge of funding for the fledgling organisations.

Plans revealed by NHS London mean that a group of practices covering 300,000 patients stands to get £500,000 a year.

Under the proposals, consortia will be given the option of either receiving the payment in cash or as working time by PCT managers.

But this latter option is only available for 2011/12. Half of PCT managers are set to be purged the following year, with consortia expected to hire the best.

Pulse has previously reported how London has received the majority of the first applications for the Government's pathfinder scheme.

Earlier this month health secretary Andrew Lansley revealed to Pulse that GP consortia would receive ‘a subset of their management allowance' in 2011/12, with the ‘great majority' of funding following in 2012/13, before consortia take over in April 2013.

The level of management funding is one of the key issues for GPs, with the Government also under pressure to clarify exactly what functions consortia will inherit from PCTs.

GPC chair Dr Laurence Buckman said: ‘It's the list of which functions as well as the level of funding which will decide if it's enough.'

There has previously been speculation that the Government was considering a management funding figure of £9 per patient per year for fully-fledged consortia.

To read the plans on London's GP consortia development programme for yourself, please click here.