GP vote of no confidence in minister a ‘cry’ for renewed contract talks

A vote of no confidence in Stormont’s health minister by GPs is a “cry” to Mike Nesbitt to resume negotiations on funding general practice, a representative has said.

The motion was passed by the British Medical Association’s Northern Ireland Local Medical Committee Conference in Belfast on Saturday, in response to the minister’s move to impose the 2025/26 GP contract on doctors, despite them rejecting its terms.

The additional £9 million offered by the minister as part of the contract fell far short of the extra £80 million GPs said was required to stabilise general practice services in Northern Ireland.

At the conference, delegates also voted no confidence in the Department of Health and agreed to examine options on how GPs could operate outside current NHS structures in the future.

The conference also agreed to consider further steps to ramp up the “collective action” that GPs announced in the summer in response to the contract imposition.

GPs are not performing certain functions that they had previously been providing.

Dr Frances O’Hagan, chairwoman of the BMA Northern Ireland GP committee, told BBC NI’s Sunday Politics programme: “The motion was brought up from the grassroots GPs to say that they wanted this motion to go through, a vote on a motion of no confidence, and it was very much on the back of how we were treated in May, and how negotiations were ended unilaterally and our contract was imposed.

“But I see it very much as a cry to say, ‘look, let’s get back around the table and rebuild that relationship’.

“Because that can only be good for patients if we get that relationship back on track and get back around the negotiating table.”

Dr O’Hagan said the vote to explore other options on how services could be provided outside NHS structures demonstrated a desire to find a workable “Plan B”.

“Outside the NHS may mean private, may mean a hybrid model, may mean working with a different structure inside the NHS as it is now,” she said.

“But if you look five years ago, you would have struggled to find a private GP in Northern Ireland.

“Now they’re popping up all over the place. So people are moving with their feet because they have to, because we are not in a position as GPs to provide the access patients want and need.”

She added: “The motion that we passed was to look at options for what we call a Plan B.

“But a Plan B is something other than what we have at the minute, which is Plan A, which is not working.

“We are not providing enough for patients, and that is exceedingly frustrating, not only for patients, but for us as well.”

On the prospect of escalating collective action to “level two”, Dr O’Hagan said vaccination programmes could be affected.

“Up to now, what we’ve done in collective action is stop doing other people’s work, so we’ve time to concentrate on our own work,” she said.

“If we can’t get back around the table with the minister, then collective action level two will start to ramp up, and that will be where we’re looking at things that we are currently funded to do, but actually we’re more or less doing for free, because we’re not being funded at an adequate rate.

“We’ll look at some of the vaccination programmes, (they) aren’t really paying us. I mean, some of them cost us money to run.

“So there’s different things that we do, for example, minor surgery and things that are extra, that are additional.

“They’re not part of our core contract, but are additional, but when you actually cost it out, we’re not being funded at a level where we’re actually making any money to do it.”

Responding to the vote of no confidence, Mr Nesbitt said: “The GPs are entitled to their opinion. My door is always open for discussion.”