Responding to Public Health England's estimate that 1 in 7 5-year olds have yet to be fully immunised against MMR, the BMA Board of Science Chair, Prof Dame Parveen Kumar said: "GPs are very concerned that the number of young children who are up to date with vaccinations seems to be falling. Measles can be a very serious illness and whilst diptheria and whooping cough are thankfully relatively rare, they remain a risk to children who are not vaccinated."  Importantly, it is frontline staff - notably GPs and Practice Nurses - who must be given the resources the provide a successful and comprehensive vaccination programme, to protect children in all parts of the population.

NHS England and the GPC England have agreed on a non-mandatory, high level data sharing template for use by PCN's. To make things easier for practices, the BMA has also produced a version of the agreed template which expands on a number of areas with greater detail, along with guidance on the document.  This provides practices with a better idea of how they might like to populate the template agreement, including proposed best practice when sharing and transferring data between partners within the network.  Further information and a link to the BMA resources are available on the BMA website.

Following further discussions on some of the finer definitions of the scope of CNSGP in England, it has been agreed with DHSC and NHS Resolution that the compiling of safeguarding reports for NHS patients will now be including within the scope. It was initially thought that as these reports can be chargeable under collaborative fees arrangements they should be deemed to be private work and therefore out of scope. However, the case was made that these are statutory reports which should be reimbursed by the system rather than as a private service to patients. 

Pulse has just reported on the NICE consultation on their draft guidance on prescribing medicinal cannabis.  It proposes to introduce shared care agreements, in which the initial prescriber is a specialist doctor and then the subsequent prescriber could be healthcare professionals, including GPs.  We are aware that this is a new and specialist area of treatment and prescribing and therefore requires specialist teams to be involved in properly assessing, and then if appropriate, treating and monitoring relevant patients. This would be the case for any very specialist drug and much remains to be seen as we move forward. The way to improve access to this assessment and treatment will be to properly resource specialist services and enable hospital services to access electronic prescribing systems.  The GPC and BMA will be responding to the consultation.