Primary Care Networks: Who are you contracting with?

Did you see our email last week with key questions for your Mandatory Network Agreements (the Agreement)? Read last week’s article here

We asked “who are you contracting with”?  Do you know?

The Agreement is a legal contract and in order to ensure that it is legally binding on all the PCN member practices, you need to ensure that those practices are correctly and accurately identified as parties to it.

Most practices are partnerships. However, partnerships are not legal entities and cannot enter the Agreement in their own right. It will therefore be the individual partners within the partnership who should each sign the Agreement. It is possible for an individual partner to sign a contract for and on behalf of his or her partnership, but ideally the Agreement should be signed by all the partners because you cannot be certain if the person signing has the authority of all the other partners.

Get it right, and the Agreement will be enforceable. Get it wrong and you may be chasing a non-entity if things go wrong.

If you would like to find out more about Mandatory Network Agreements and how we can assist Networks generally, please contact our specialist team.

We have also developed a training programme on this, and other topical themes, which we would be happy to discuss with you.