GPs advised to use ‘tweaked’ versions of BMA letter to notify ICBs of collective action
GPs in several areas have been advised by their LMCs to use ‘tweaked’ versions of the BMA’s template letter for collective action around data sharing.
As part of collective action which started on Friday last week, GPs should notify their ICB that they are stopping voluntarily sharing data using a template letter provided by the union’s GP committee.
LMCs including Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire (BBO), Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland (LLR) and Humberside have edited the letter to account for local circumstances and local ICB leads and advised practices send this version to their ICBs instead.
GPC chair Dr Katie Bramall said that the letter has been checked by the union’s legal teams but that it is ‘editable’ and practices should ‘edit out anything they would rather not say’.
Last week the GPC voted to immediately enter collective action against this year’s imposed contract given the Government’s ‘insufficient assurances’ regarding their concerns over unlimited access.
The first single collective action that the committee is urging practices to take is to cease signing up to any new voluntary data sharing agreements (DSAs) that ‘extract patient data for secondary uses’, for example, medical research conducted by charities, commercial organisations and universities or health service planning carried out by Government agencies or local NHS organisations.
Dr Bramall said via social media: ‘I have seen various messages circulating. The letter has been through BMA head of legal and external expert counsel.
‘Look at helpful LMCs such as Grant Ingrams at LLR LMC (DDLMCs, others are available, Humberside too and Avon as well!) who are tweaking the letter for their local system and their known DSAs.
‘It’s an editable Word doc, and you are sending it on behalf of your partnership, so by all means edit out anything you would rather not say.
‘But trust me, if the BMA lawyers are content, and an expert external KC is content, it has to be extremely vanilla.’
BBO LMCs chief executive Dr Matt Mayer told Pulse that they edited the letter to say that the LMC will be writing to the ICB ‘more comprehensively’ to explain what is needed from them.
He said that the LMC will wait for the review from the ICB before advising practices to opt out from the data sharing agreements.
Dr Mayer said: ‘We’ve redacted the letter heavily so that practices now feel safer to send it. The LMC will send the dangerous bit and the LMC will be the filter.
‘One of the concerns is that GPs are the data controllers, so like Copperfield wrote yesterday, if you write in a letter “we don’t understand our data sharing agreements and want you to do a review of them”, if there’s any breach of data governance the problem is coming back to the GP.
‘And if the ICB come back and say “why don’t you understand your own data sharing agreements? That’s not very good” that reflects badly on the practice.
‘So we have taken those bits out, and said that it’s been quite hard to understand the full register of data sharing agreements so we want you to review them.’
The letter as revised by BBO LMCs said: ‘Pending the outcome of this review, the practice intends to reconsider participation in any discretionary data sharing arrangements.
‘We understand that our LMC will imminently be in contact with you similarly requesting such a system wide review of data sharing agreements on behalf of constituent practices, and will work with the ICB to establish the detail of such a review, and ensure it is completed in a timely manner.’
It comes as the Government remains in discussions with the GPC, as it said that collective action will have ‘no impact’.
