Primary Care: Delivering care closer to home
Current approaches to healthcare are often unsuccessful at keeping people out of hospitals. Across 30 OECD countries, hospitalisations for diabetes, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, heart failures and hypertension, all of which are largely avoidable through strong primary health care.
75 years’ experience
The NHS has 75 years’ experience in delivering integrated, affordable and clinically effective care. The foundation of the UK healthcare system has been a strong and dynamic primary care sector skilled in delivering:
- Community-focused public health
- Person centred care
- Data driven approaches to planning, monitoring and improving whole health and care system outputs
The Average UK GP
- Will look after over 9800 patients (June 2023 figures, Statista)
- Has 4 GPs, plus 4 other clinicians and 10 other practice staff (admin and health care assistants)
- Sees patients from 8am – 6.30pm Monday to Friday, increasingly evening and weekends
- Will usually have up to 190 patient consultations a day, including face-to face (majority), telephone and on-line
- Sees patients from 8am – 6.30pm Monday to Friday, increasingly evening & weekends
- Will usually have up to 190 patient consultations a day, including face-to face (majority), telephone & on-line
Stats source: NHS
Key Challenges
NHS Primary Care organisations in the UK are uniquely placed to address across the globe include:
- Increasing demand – as populations grow and age, we see an increase in long term conditions and the complexity of ill health. This requires an increased focus on preventing disease, delivering patient centred care and designing more integrated healthcare systems. This approach is central to how the NHS delivers care.
- Changing needs – patients today require tailored diagnostics and treatment that is relevant to them and which is accessed in care settings close to home. This means moving away from traditional forms of family medicine and enabling community medical teams to apply new discoveries and technologies such as those in genomics and pharmacology to deliver care to where it is needed – at the right time, in the right place for each individual. The NHS has led the way in harnessing innovation to meet changing patient needs
- Fragmentation and disjointed care pathways – this is a feature of many existing primary care health systems and leads to increased cost and poor health outcomes. Learning generated by NHS transformation programmes supports the development of more connected, technology enabled care systems focussed on improving health and reducing cost.
Primary Care Networks
To meet the growing needs of people living with long term conditions, GP practices work with community, mental health, social care, pharmacy, hospital and voluntary services in groups of practices known as primary care networks (PCNs). PCNs enable greater provision of proactive, personalised, coordinated and more integrated health and social care for people close to home. Clinicians describe this as a change from reactively providing appointments to proactively caring for the people and communities they serve.
PCNs serve natural communities of between 30,000 to 50,000 people: small enough to provide the personal care but large enough to have impact and economies of scale through better collaboration between GP practices and others in the local health and social care system.
Find out more
Contact us for more information about the UK’s services in Primary Care.