# 3387
Flu season is still months away in the UK, but GPs are reporting a major increase in their workloads due to the H1N1 virus spreading among their communities.
The `official’ numbers of roughly 3,000 confirmed cases represents only a fraction of the total cases. Selective testing of patients, based on strict and arbitrary criteria, has been criticized for weeks as not accurately gauging the true spread of the virus.
Below we get a report on the growing dispute between GPs and Ministers unwilling to suspend the QOF, or Quality and Outcomes Framework, which is an annual reward and incentive program for GP surgeries in England, based on a series of benchmarks.
Benchmarks that are going to be increasingly difficult for Surgeries to meet given the increased workload presented by a pandemic.
If Surgeries are stressed now, in the `off season’ for influenza, one must wonder what this fall will bring.
This from Pulse.
Swine flu 'not severe enough' to suspend QOF
24 Jun 09
By Steve Nowottny
The Department of Health has changed the rules set out in its own pandemic plans so it no longer needs to suspend the QOF in areas hit hardest by swine flu, Pulse can reveal.
Ministers have abandoned the alert system developed for a flu pandemic because they say the virus is not sufficiently severe to warrant radical action, and are rebuffing desperate appeals by GP leaders to relieve pressure on practices.
The GPC has called for an immediate suspension of the QOF and other routine work in four cities – London, Birmingham, Glasgow and Sheffield – as GPs struggle to cope with hundreds of new cases.
As first revealed last Friday on pulsetoday.co.uk, GPC negotiators have repeatedly pressed the DH to declare UK alert level 3, which is supposed to be triggered when one or more outbreaks occur in the UK.
Level 3 would be the signal for GMC pandemic flu guidance to come into force and the QOF to be suspended, with GPs to be paid based on last year’s performance.
But the DH has yet to use any UK alert levels, insisting ‘the majority of cases are not severe and we are not seeing sustained community transmission’.
