Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, whether the new NHS Indemnity cover for GPs will be extended to GPs working or willing to work for the NHS, who despite being cleared by the GMC and the Medical Practitioners Tribunal Service had been declined indemnity by the traditional three indemnity organisations.

The Secretary of State announced on 12 October 2017 that the Government is planning to develop a state-backed indemnity scheme for general practice in England, subject to further work on relevant issues.

We envisage the scheme would provide clinical negligence cover to providers of general practitioner (GP) services (e.g. GP contractors out-of-hours providers of GP services) through which the activities of individual GPs would be covered from the point the scheme is established. It would be available to all contractors who provide primary medical services: General Medical Services, Primary Medical Service and Alternative Provider Medical Services plus any other integrated urgent care delivered through NHS Standard Contracts. The cover would include the activities of practice staff including other medical professionals working for the practice in the provision of these contracted services, and students/trainees working in this area.

Decisions have yet to be made about inclusion of doctors working in other public sector settings including prisons and the Ministry of Defence. We are working with GPs and their representatives, other providers of primary medical services and practice staff to develop the scheme and its scope so as to work best for general practice, and for patients.