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PCNs and community services should be more aligned as a step towards building integrated neighbourhood teams, according to NHS England guidance.
In the 2024/25 priorities and operational planning guidance, published today, NHS England asks systems to help improve the alignment of relevant community services to the primary care network footprint.
It said the initial focus should be delivering ‘proactive care’ to the most complex and vulnerable patients with the aim of reducing ‘avoidable exacerbations’ of ill health. And also to improve the quality of care for older people including those in care homes, in line with the PCN enhanced health in care homes service.
Access to community and primary care services remains an ‘overall priority’ for the NHS this year, it added.
Integrated care coordination
The document also called on ICBs to set up an integrated care coordination (ICC) service that will ‘support GPs and integrated neighbourhood teams’.
NHS England said this should include access to urgent community response, acute respiratory infection hubs and falls services and added that systems ‘may wish to extend this option to include SDEC [same day emergency care], acute frailty services or virtual wards’.
It said: ‘ICCs will support GPs and integrated neighbourhood teams to manage the escalation of patients with urgent and complex needs at home (including care homes), avoiding unnecessary hospital admissions.
‘There should be clear pathways from 111, 999 and other services into each ICC, and ambulance crews should be supported to embed call before convey in local practice.’
It added that further advice and guidance would be published on the key principles of ICCs ‘shortly’ and learning from ongoing evaluation models in spring 2024.
In a foreword to the guidance, NHS England chief executive Amanda Pritchard said the NHS was facing ‘major challenges’ and admitted that funding was ‘flat’ for 2024/25.
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