NHS Fife and the Fife Health and Social Care Partnership are seeking new GP contractors to take over the running of three medical practices in the Kingdom.
Kinghorn Medical Practice, Valleyfield Practice and the Links Practice in Burntisland have been operated by NHS Fife and the Fife Health and Social Care Partnership since the previous GP partners became unable deliver their contracted general medical services.
Work has been ongoing for some time to identify appropriate interested parties to take over the contract to deliver services from these Practices and return them to independent contractor status. There is currently a level of interest to merit making the contract to provide general medical services from these three available through a tender process.
The aim of the tender process is to attract new GP contractors for the Practices with the clinical staffing resources to provide the good standard of service that patients expect and deserve. Those interested in taking over the general medical services contract/s are now being invited to submit a detailed proposal outlining how they would intend to deliver services for patients in any of the three areas.
Once received, a thorough process of assessment and evaluation will be completed for each submission in the new year, with any successful bids approved by the NHS Fife Board in Spring 2023.
The process of tendering contracts to provide general medical services has been carried out successfully in other parts of the country, and NHS Fife and the Fife Health and Social Care are following the well-established national procurement framework to ensure the tendering process is thorough and robust.
The process of engaging with the staff in each practice has begun and NHS Fife is also writing out to the citizens served by all three practices to ensure they are informed of these developments.
NHS Fife Medical Director, Dr Christopher McKenna said:
“We want all patients in Fife to have access to a good quality of service from their local GP practice. The difficulty in sourcing permanent, reliable GP cover at Kinghorn, Links and Valleyfield Medical Practice has meant that this has been incredibly difficult to achieve in recent times.
“Work has been ongoing for some time to identify suitable interested parties to potentially take over the contract to deliver services from all three Practices and return them to independent contractor status. We believe there is now a sufficient level of interest to merit making these contracts available via a tender process, as had been done successfully in other parts of the country.
“It is important to say, however, that if new management is not found for any of the three practices then our efforts to stabilise these practices and ensure people still have access to appropriate local medical services will continue.
“Most importantly of all, any parties seeking to take over the running of any of the practices will have to demonstrate that they have the clinical staffing resources to provide patients with a good level of service.
“The process of tendering the contract to provide general medical services will take a number of months to complete, and we are committed to ensuring that patients are kept up to date with any developments throughout.”
A patient information hub has been created on the NHS Fife website at: www.nhsfife.org/generalmedicalservices, where there are answers to a number of frequently asked questions.
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