GPs offering Private Services
GPs offering Private Services
We are receiving a number of enquiries from practices regarding offering private services. The article below seeks to explain the contractual limitations practices face when seeking to offer private services.
- Private practice is significantly restricted in terms of NHS registered patients for GMS (general medical services) and PMS (personal medical services) contractors. Part 5, Regulation 24 of the National Health Service (General Medical Services Contracts) Regulations 2015 (which are replicated in any PMS contract), sets out the basic exclusion in charging NHS patients for care. It states:
- the contractor must not, either itself or through any other person, demand or accept from any of its patients a fee or other remuneration for its own benefit or for the benefit of another person in respect of the provision of any treatment whether under the contract or otherwise, or a prescription or repeatable prescription for any drug, medicine or appliance.
- There are some very limited circumstances where a fee may be charged for services to an NHS registered patient, which are set out in Regulation 25. These relate to travel vaccinations and travel packs.
- Neither GMS or PMS contracts stop contractors accepting private patients for care, but they cannot simultaneously be NHS registered patients with the practice holding the GMS or PMS contract under which they are cared for.
- New contractual regulations introduced in October 2019, restrict GP practices from offering or advertising - during NHS working time and on NHS funded property - private services to anyone (whether a registered patient or not), if those services fall within the scope of primary medical services.
- This means that if a practice provides an NHS commissioned service, they cannot then charge for (or host) that same service during hours where they provide those NHS services and on their practice premises.
- This does not affect a practice’s ability to charge non-registered patients for services that are not part of primary medical services (i.e. not NHS commissioned services) or to charge their own patients for travel vaccinations.
- Practices must be aware that using NHS funded premises to offer private services could result in rent being abated.
Example below:
