Traditional models of general practice continue to provide the best patient care while APMS providers seek to transfer costs to secondary care through higher numbers of referrals and exception reporting, new research has found.
A study published in Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine found that APMS practices provided worse quality care than practices on GMS or PMS contracts, even when the demographical differences such as age and deprivation were taken into account.
It concluded that opening up the NHS to competition from private providers ‘may have even led to worse care’, and calls on commissioners to hold APMS practices to the same standards as GMS and PMS practices.
Full story in Pulse, 24 April 2015
