According to the Head of Primary Care at NHS England, Dr David Geddes,the ongoing problems with payments to GP practices will be resolved by next April at the very latest.

Issues such as practices receiving incorrect or late payments, which have caused huge problems for many GPs, stem from the handover from Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) this April.

However, according to Dr Geddes, such problems were “inevitable”, given the complexity of the handover but he offered a “cast iron” guarantee that they would ironed out by the end of March, enabling GPs to prepare their year-end accounts.

The late or incorrect payments caused some practices to be threatened with court summonses for unpaid bills and as recently as last month almost half of GPs in England were still experiencing issues caused by them, which GP leaders have called “unacceptable”.

Dr Geddes said that he understood how important it was for practices to be able to have a clear audit trail and that some solutions have been found but that it is a case of finding more and moving on.

He also suggested that the Quality Outcomes Framework (QOF) could continue to shrink in future years so that Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) could use the freed up cash for their local commissioning priorities.

Dr Geddes said the reason behind this is to rebalance the work that GPs are asked to do, thereby taking the process away from bureaucracy and moving it to more meaningful clinical engagement.

However, GP leaders have said that, as practices have different year ends, many will not benefit from the problems being sorted out by April and find it incomprehensible that it will have taken a year to iron out issues caused by the handover.