It is indeed good news that undergraduate general practice attachments are at last to be funded at the same level as teaching in hospitals. But Rosenthal et al’s1 history of the journey from the publication of the 1976 Resource Allocation Working Party Report2 omits significant detail.
In fact, negotiations were set in motion in December 1981 by John Walker (in England) and John Howie (in Scotland) aiming to achieve a Service Increment for Teaching (SIFT) equivalent payment for teaching in general practice. These were protracted, meeting much resistance, but in October 1987, after many early legal difficulties had been resolved, Junior Health Minister Edwina Currie agreed, in a Parliamentary Adjournment Debate, to make financial support available to support undergraduate teaching attachments for the first time. This promise was eventually realised as part of the 1990 ‘New GP Contract’, the payments being indeed set at 12.50 GBP per GP half-day session.
At the time we were delighted to be able to reimburse our service GP colleagues for teaching work that had previously been almost entirely voluntary, and general practice undergraduate teaching expanded. But until now equivalence of hospital and GP funding has never been achieved. Rosenthal’s warning about future vigilance to maintain the hard-won new parity must be heeded.
July 2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the first Scientific Meeting of what developed into the Association of University Teachers of General Practice, since 2000 the Society for Academic Primary Care. To ensure that the history of the evolution of general practice as a university discipline is on record, we are preparing an ‘archive’, shortly to be lodged with Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) Archivist Heather Heath. This will include a paper record of the full story of the early SIFT negotiations complete with extensive excerpts from Hansard, parliamentary records, and correspondence with a succession of Chief Medical Officers and officials at the English and Scottish Departments of Health.3
- © British Journal of General Practice 2022
