NHS England has announced that it is investigating why GP practices around the country have been underpaid by thousands of pounds for the Avoiding Unplanned Admissions (AUA) Directed Enhanced Service (DES).

A number of GP practices have reported issues with payments for the DES, with IT systems not logging care plans, practices having to manually enter records of patent deaths and Calculating Quality Reporting System (CQRS) failing to collects data on achievement.

NHS England is investigating these problems, amongst others, in co-operation with the Health and Social Care Information Centre (HSCIC), which is responsible for updating IT system providers based on information supplied by NHS England.

According to HSCIC, it is working with area teams and IT suppliers to address what it describes as unconfirmed reports of practices missing achievement targets, against their expectations, and is advising practices to approach their area teams for local solutions.

However, a spokesman for the General Practitioners’ Committee (GPC) said that the missing payments constitute a general issue that is happening quite widely rather than merely something local. He added that the Committee has therefore made strong representation to NHS England to get the matter sorted out.

There are evidently problems with the IT system, with one practice explaining that it was missing £10,000 in funding because the IT report showed it had registered no patients on its list who were most likely to have an unplanned admission, even though it had in fact registered the two per cent of its list, as required by the DES.

In order to combat these glitches in the short term, some GPs have been advised to send NHS England a screen shot of their clinical system to prove their record of their achievement. However, a suggestion that area teams could pay practices based on their own records of their achievement, in a bid to prevent serious cash flow problems, were blocked by NHS England.