This all depends on whether you are a registered manager.

For CQC, a Registered Manager is the person registered with the CQC to be in day-to-day management of one or more regulated activities. The registered manager takes on special responsibilities and has a legal role in enabling and monitoring compliance with essential standards across your regulated activities.

If you are a practice manager who agrees to be the registered manager as well, your role will change from just administrative to that of being legally responsible for compliance. What this means is that if there are serious failures, you can be held responsible, fined and even prosecuted.

Alternatively, you could remain a practice manager and one of the partners might be appointed as the registered manager for the purposes of CQC, in which case nothing much changes for you in terms of your legal responsibilities as your role is seen largely as being administrative. In reality of course the practice manager will still manage all the compliance work and the GP will need to keep better informed on exactly what's going on.

Be careful
The Registered manager position is not just an admin job.
During our audits, we have found instances where practice managers have sometimes declared the practice to be fully compliant on QOF or GMS contract, even though they were not, with the intention of catching up a little later. This now becomes a criminal offence. This is why the CQC and the BMA suggest that the Registered Manager is likley to be a GP partner.

To be pragmatic, we don't think anyone will be prosecuted for minor things, but if things go drastically wrong, these little infractions will suddenly become a big deal. Why take a chance?

If you become a Registered Manager, we recommend that you take your responsibilities very seriously.