NHS England has outlined plans and actions to support general practice and primary care networks this winter.
A letter from Dr Amanda Doyle, National Director, Primary Care and Community Services, sent to GP practices and primary care networks, highlights a series of actions to increase capacity outside of acute trusts, identify where resources are needed the most, scale additional roles in primary care and support greater flexibility for primary care networks.
The actions are inline with Dr Claire Fuller’s Next Steps for Integrating Primary Care, and include an Integrated Care Board (ICB) framework for supporting general practice, immediate changes to the Network Contract DES, and supporting the primary/secondary care interface.
The first action of the plan focuses on a framework for ICBs to determine where investment can be best targeted. It covers areas for ICBs to ask, such as is cloud-based telephony in place, what is the functionality in use, and how many practices are using it.
Use of data for improvement is a key area of the framework, for ICBs to report on what business intelligence tools are in use, by how many practices and if it is being used to understand demand.
Operational efficiency comes into focus, to explore business functions such as document workflow and pathology results, and if this could be improved.
The framework then goes on to ask ICBs to understand if primary care networks have or do not have the interoperability capability to work and enable enhanced access, and to consider funding to support this.
Updating GP practice websites and patient communication is also a key line, referencing a recent guidance document, ‘creating a highly usable and accessible GP website for patients’. The guide details how GP websites could be developed to improve a user experience and improve the likelihood digital tools are used.
Specific questions are also being asked to the ICS to understand; how does the ICS support the spread and adoption of automating business functions, does the ICS plan to support further automation of practice functions, do practices have effective systems in place for care navigation, what support does the ICS provide to monitor and support this to ensure it is safe and effective, and how many practices and primary care networks use a system of clinical triage for appointment requests.
One area to support the actions, the document introduces further flexibility to the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme, including the addition of a GP assistant role to help reduce administrative burden for GP teams, and a digital and transformation lead role.
The digital and transformation lead will be funded to support the adoption and optimisation of tech, capped at one role per primary care network. The role will lead improvement, collaboration, clinically led innovation, understanding the use of data, and to improve a primary care network’s digital maturity.
To read the document, please click here.
