GP practices can now sign up to the promised support programme to help them achieve changes set out in NHS England’s recovery plan for general practice.
The General Practice Improvement Programme (GPIP), promised in the Delivery Plan for Recovering Access to Primary Care, will provide support for practices and primary care networks (PCNs) until 2025.
The aim is to help them to have ‘more control over their workload, maximise the use of all staff roles and local services, meet the needs of patients and provide safe, equitable care’, said NHS England.
The support programme focuses on five areas:
- Understanding and managing demand and capacity;
- Enhancing care navigation and triage processes;
- Improving the experience for patients of telephoning their practice (‘the telephony journey’);
- Improving the experience for patients of contacting their practice and managing their care online (focusing on practice websites, online consultation tools, messaging systems and appointment booking tools);
- Management of non-patient-facing practice workload.
GPIP provides three levels of support: a universal offer, available to every practice in England; an intermediate offer for practices that require more help; and an intensive offer providing targeted support for those working in the most challenging circumstances.
In the universal offer, practices can access webinars covering the five priority areas and advice on making practical changes. There are also online resources such as guidance on quick wins and best practice. And there are training opportunities on tools and techniques.
The intermediate tier for practices is a ‘hands-on’ package of support delivered over three months starting 4 September to enable planning and delivery of improvements. This support will include facilitated in-person sessions, a data diagnosis and a tailored analysis of demand and capacity.
And the intensive offer provides targeted, hands-on support for those practices working in the most challenging circumstances. Delivered over six months, starting on 2 October, practices will benefit from on-site support as well as group-based sessions to facilitate peer-to-peer learning and sharing of experience across practices. The deadline to register is 15 September.
Integrated care boards (ICBs) have been asked to nominate practices and PCNs for intensive and intermediate support, ideally after needs have been identified using the support level framework (SLF). The SLF is a clinically developed tool to support organisations in understanding their development needs and not a performance management tool.
Practices or PCNs that have not yet had a facilitated conversation using the SLF can still be put forward for support, however.
Surgeries that want to register for intermediate or intensive support need to sign up to an information webinar first. PCNs should contact england.pctgpip@nhs.net to express an interest in participating.
NHS England has said practices participating in the intermediate or intensive support programme will need to have a cloud/internet-based phone system that generates data such as call volumes by time, dropped calls and waiting times, and currently use a digital contact tool such as an online consultation system. And they should be willing to undertake an SLF-focused discussion involving their practice team and that encourages ‘honest reflection’.
Meanwhile, applications are also open for the next cohort of General Practice Improvement Leads, which will begin in September. It is described as a personal development programme designed to help participants lead their teams through change.
The GP recovery plan released early this year set out targets for practices to improve access, with the main support being the introduction of digital telephony systems. However a Pulse survey found almost half of GPs who have already implemented ‘modern’ access measures prescribed by plan say that it has not helped improve access.
A version of this story was first published by Pulse’s sister title Management in Practice
GPIP is a rehash of old ideas which almost all practices have been using to manage over the last 10 years or more. It does not address the main issues and implies efficiency changes, change management, IT and flogging the horse even more will work. There is just not enough capacity for the current demand and neither is their funding to provide it. I’m old enough to remember an initiative to mathx capacity to demand by analysis when labour were on power in 2008. The 5 focus areas have already been rehashed multiple times with no success.
This reminds me of Ronald Reagan’s quote: “The most terrifying words in the English language are: I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”
Surely the biggest improvements in NHS productivity would be to put these teams into hospitals and hospital outpatients in particular. These are the low productivity areas that need most improvement.
General practice is incredibly efficient and has very high productivity levels – we are just underfunded.
If hospitals matched our productivity levels rather than dumping their workload on us a significant chunk of our problems would disappear.
Excellent point regarding hospitals. Many hospital consultants are laughing at how hospitals do not work; for example, when hospital managers cancel Orthopaedics (or many other specialties too) outpatient clinics or theatre operations, (due to staff shortages or sickness as examples) then tell the consultant to just go and operate on their private patients down the road at BUPA or somewhere, and they end up being paid twice (Wow!) (once privately and secondly by NHS) due to this crazy shenanigans of the management of the NHS. The consultants, through no fault of their own, are laughing gleefully all the way to the banks. Meanwhile what are Amanda Preachard and others at NHSE, and Steve Barclaysbank, (Secretary of state, Health), doing to halt the serious decline in management of the NHS? or are this lot content to settle on, or even creating, further inefficiencies? Absolutely ridiculous isn’t it.