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Five tips to survive the national PMS review

1 Understand the nature of your contract

Do not panic, but ensure that you do the necessary homework to protect your funding. Not all PMS contracts are the same. Ensure that you understand what you are contracted to deliver and have made every effort to deliver it.

2 Document your services

Ensure that you have records to show the additional services that you are providing and what improvements they have delivered for patients or outcomes. For example, if you deliver a service for homeless people, gather all the evidence you can about their satisfaction with the service they receive and assess the impact if you did not provide it.

3 Mobilise your patients

PMS is about responding to local needs, so your patients need to be aware there could be a fundamental change to services you provide. Make sure your patients know what is going on. The more open you are about what is happening, the better.

4 Have informal conversations with your local area teams

If you recently had a PMS review, we would hope that NHS England will be sophisticated enough in its approach to identify good value for money and not destabilise practices and discourage innovation. But it will be helpful for you to get a feel for what the prospect is of a review and when it is planned to occur. Also try to assess which potential new key performance indicators are likely to be selected as important. This will have a big impact on the information you should collect to support your case.

5 Seek help 

GPs affected by this review should seek help from their local LMC and the BMA. The NAPC can also help. If you inform us, we can share intelligence and support each other.