Dr Robin Miller is a Senior Fellow at the Health Services Management Centre of the University of Birmingham. He has been researching the relationships between general practice and social workers and has gained interesting insights into how this relationship has struggled in the past and how it might develop in the future. In our thirtieth podcast he explains all to Ben.

A fascinating episode this week with Dr Tracey Vell, LMC lead in Greater Manchester. Greater Manchester is one of six areas working on a draft of the MCP contract and Tracey tells Ben about the progress being made, about the incentives for local GPs to get involved and about the surprising levels of engagement amongst GPs across the area.

In the final episode of our short series of podcasts on GP Locum Chambers, Ben talks to Richard Fieldhouse, Chairman of the National Association of Sessional GPs and one of the first GPs to set up a locum chambers. A number of challenging questions from listeners about locum GPs and chambers have arisen during our series of podcasts and Ben puts these more difficult questions to Richard.

Ben talks to Jenny Stone, an accountant with a firm which has considerable experience in advising and supporting practices through mergers. She explains the steps that practices have to take and exposes some of the hidden difficulties that merging practices can experience.

The MCP contract framework is raising a number of questions in general practice. Ben thinks it has more important implications than the GP Forward View and is keen to explain why.

Ben talks to the third of our GPs working in locum chambers. Charlotte Hattersley has managed to develop the ideal life – a portfolio career in the English Lake District. She tells Ben how she has achieved this, how GP locum chambers have helped and how the common perception of locums is all wrong.

Ben talks to Maureen Baker, Chair of the RCGP and Megan Stodel, Senior Research Officer at the RCGP on the financial analysis they undertook on the GP Forward View. The discussion unpacks some of the headline financial commitments in the GPFV and tries to establish how much will be coming to who and when.

Ben talks to Rebecca Rosen, a GP and author of a new report from the Nuffield Trust called “Is Bigger Better? Lessons for large-scale general practice”. They discuss the benefits of working at scale including the impact on staff and patients and the surprisingly limited impact on quality. Rebecca also has advice for practices thinking of working at greater scale and for CCGs who are supporting the development of General Practice.

Caroline Chill was a GP partner for 24 years before leaving in 2012 to pursue a portfolio career. Intending to locum only as a “stop gap” she discovered and joined her local locum GP chambers and has now worked through the chambers for four years. She tells Ben about how the chambers works for her and how it has allowed her to regain her enthusiasm for medicine.