As set out in the NHS Long Term Plan published in January 2019, Practices will work together with other health and social care services, to strengthen and redesign primary care. These new partnerships are called ‘Primary Care Networks’. This doesn’t mean that surgeries will merge to become one organisation; it just means that the GPs and Managers within their separate surgeries have agreed to work closer together in a more connected way.
Maybush is one of four practices working together as Trinity Health Group Primary Care Network; other practices in our group include:
- Warrengate Medical Centre
- Crofton and Sharlston Medical Practice; and
- Trinity Medical Centre
Together, we have a total list size of over 53,000 patients, and whilst it’s still early days, working as a PCN will give us the ability to recruit more staff such as pharmacists, social prescribers, physios, and paramedics to offer a broader range of services. This approach will help us improve the health and well-being of our patients and lead to a longer, healthier lives.
Our plan is to identify gaps in their service and enhance care for our local community. We will also look to improve preventative care by providing a complete personalised service from all health and social care professionals. For example, GPs, district nurses, community mental health, and other hospital specialists will come together and look at the needs of the population and provide care in the community where and when it is needed.
Our vision as a network is to deliver an integrated care model that improves the health and well-being of our local community supported by partner organisations in the wider health and social care system. Within this new collaborative way of working multi-disciplinary teams will share ideas and generate enthusiasm for designing and implementing sustainable service improvements.
We have reviewed our locality health data which has enabled us to identify 3 key priorities – which include smoking cessation, weight management and social prescribing. We are now engaging with our stakeholders from health care, social care and voluntary sector organisation’s to develop service improvement plans that focus on medical and non-medical solutions.
We have already developed and fully integrated triage service which patients from all 4 practices can access. This is called Trinity Care and helps support our network practices with same day capacity. This provision is currently being further developed into a Clinical Assessment Service.
Patients registered within our PCN can also access a Community Psychiatric Nurse and a IAPT Link Worker from any of the 4 practices. The IAPT link worker see’s patients with low level mental health due to long term conditions and/or medically unexplained symptoms.
It is hoped that our PCN will foster more resilience, better patient outcomes, and reduce stress and burn out of GPs. Maybush is committed to continue working closely with the CCG, Conexus and Trinity Health Group in the on-going development and provision of patient services closer to home.
The animation below from NHS England explains the concept of PCNs and how this new way of working enables health and other services to work together to provide better access for patients.