September GP Update - RCGP Open Letter & NHS Tech Register

So the RCGP letter.

So this has come out in the last few days, dated 28th of August.

It's a letter on RCGP headed paper signed by, I think, all of the living RCGP presidents and chairs.

I think it says a letter from past and present presidents and chairs might not be all of the living ones, to be honest.

I'm not, I'm not sure.

Maybe I've just sort of made that up.

It would be nice, but a really wide variety of people over the last few years, some familiar names.

And it sort of, talks about the positioning and kind of needs and role of general practice in the coming ambitious healthcare sort of restructures that are coming up.

And it sets out five commitments that they'd like to see NHS England, Department of Health, and sort of everybody subscribed to in terms of getting those changes right from a GP perspective.

So it's a really, really interesting letter, I guess.

Shall we dive in and have a kind of pick through it, Gandhi?

Yeah, so unlike some of the letters we covered previously, this is relatively short, to be honest.

It's only two pages, the third page being all the signatures, all 19 of them.

But yeah, I think it'd be worth us just probably reading it, isn't it, Andy? Yeah.

Yeah.

Should we read through and reflect? Cause I think it is, it is interesting.

And then there were a few things to say, I guess, at the end about what maybe kind of isn't there that we might've expected to see based on things that the RCGP normally talk about and normally say.

Um, so, uh, so they kind of set the case out and say, yep, we're at a pivotal point, you know, in NHS, uh, development, um, in, uh, in, you know, in health and social care.

Um, the decisions that are made over the next few months will shape the health of the nation for a generation.

Um, So to me, that's talking about actually, I guess, positioning this letter to influence those people just taking up their jobs.

I think

sort of Andy Burnham and Yvette Cooper and others kind of moving in there.

So I think that's sort of what that's saying to us from my perspective.

And then so between us, we have led the Royal College of General Practitioners across successive decades and governments.

So the people signing the letter have got a lot of experience.