The introduction of the NCIA in 2022 sees more clinical excellence awards made available – but at lower rates
Unveiling reforms of the National Clinical Excellence Awards (NCEA) in January, the Government said it was making the scheme “fairer and more accessible”. But doctors will need to get to grips with the detail of the changes – in some cases very significant – in order to understand the impact on their own finances.
Still, the first change is purely a cosmetic one. The scheme, which operates in England and Wales, has been renamed. What was previously the NCEA is now known as the National Clinical Impact Award (NCIA) scheme. The rebranding takes effect from the 2022 scheme onwards.
These awards have run in one form or another since 1948, but the ambition has remained broadly similar. They aim to reward those high-performing senior doctors, including consultants, senior dentists and academic GPs, who make the greatest contributions to delivering safe and high-quality care, as well as to improving the NHS’s services.
Ministers argue that more doctors are deserving of such rewards than it has previously been affordable to support. So, the number of awards available in 2022 has doubled from 300 to 600, though the latter figure is the maximum that could be awarded rather than a target to be hit.
That’s the good news. The downside is that in order to pay for this expansion, the incentives on offer from the NCIA are notably less generous than what was available from the NCEA.
The previous scheme offered four awards: Bronze (worth £36,192 a year), Silver (£47,582), Gold (£59,477) and Platinum (£77,320). In their place, the NCIA offers only three awards in England: there are roughly 330 N1 awards worth £20,000 a year, 200 N2 awards worth £30,000 each, and 70 N3 awards worth £40,000. In addition, doctors in Wales can also apply for an N0 award worth £10,000.
More positively, at least for doctors not in full-time roles, the NCIA awards are payable in full irrespective of the hours worked by successful applicants. While part-time doctors with awards from the NCEA received pro-rata payments according to their hours, this is not the case with the new scheme.
The other significant change here is that the NCIA awards will not be pensionable. Under the NCEA, doctors receiving awards were entitled to include their payments in their pensionable pay – the figure against which their pension entitlements accrue. But this won’t be the case with the NCIA, so the additional incentive will not increase doctors’ pensions in retirement.
Each award granted will be payable for five years; at the end of this period, doctors will be entitled to reapply for the scheme, though they’ll be competing with new applicants as well as others hoping their awards will carry on. This may make it more difficult for doctors to secure an ongoing award compared to the reapplication process under the NCEA.
The deadline for applications for NCIA awards expired on 22 June, having opened on 27 April, so this year’s awards are currently under consideration. The Advisory Committee on Clinical Impact Awards (ACCIA) will inform doctors’ employers of their decisions in writing in the coming months. Successful awards will usually be paid and backdated to the beginning of the financial year.
The exception is that NCEA scheme awards-holders now applying for the NCIA will see any new award begin from the expiry date of their previous one. There are also transitional arrangements in place for these doctors – their pay will be protected during the first award period under the new scheme and the full value of their first award will be pensionable.
Given these changes and nuances, many doctors will have some potentially tricky decisions to make. For example, if you currently have a pensionable award, will it make more sense, on expiry, to apply for your local clinical excellence award scheme rather than the new national arrangement? You could also find that where a doctor is unsuccessful in applying for renewal of their existing national award, they revert (based on their national score) to an old-style pensionable local award. So technically there’s no application there – it’s automatic. It also means that someone would likely be better off narrowly failing to successfully renew their national award and dropping down to a pensionable local award, noting that if they applied for a new local award, those are also now not pensionable. With so much complexity it may make sense to take professional financial advice on your best option.
Finally, note that the NCIA will only operate in England and Wales (in Wales, doctors can also receive commitment awards). Scotland does offer consultants the opportunity to apply for discretionary points – and therefore additional pay – but no award scheme has run in Northern Ireland for some time.
More detail on the move from the NCEA to the NCIA is available via the ACCIA pages on the Gov.UK website.
Content correct at time of writing and is intended for general information only and should not be construed as advice.