The Prime Minister’s plans to shift care into the community should include ‘co-location’ of GP practices with other services, the RCGP has said.
In a speech at the King’s Fund conference earlier today, Sir Keir Starmer pledged the ‘biggest reimagining’ of the NHS since its beginning, in response to Lord Ara Darzi’s damning review of the health service.
In a session at the same conference, RCGP chair Professor Kamila Hawthorne discussed how the Prime Minister could fulfil his promise to shift care away from hospitals and into communities.
She said she wants to see ‘co-location of services’ whereby GP practices sit alongside the wider primary care teams in ‘neighbourhood hubs’.
But Professor Hawthorne pointed out that this should ‘not necessarily’ take the form of a ‘massive polyclinic’, referring to Lord Darzi’s failed plan to expand GP services under the previous Labour Government.
‘Whatever is developed, I would want to see co-location of services – not necessarily a massive polyclinic, which is where we were 10 years ago – but maybe a neighbourhood hub that has a lot of these services for the community,’ she told delegates.
As examples of good practice, the RCGP chair pointed to the trail-blazing Bromley-by-Bow GP centre in East London which brings together various community services, as well as the Healthy Hyde PCN in Manchester which works with schools to support children’s mental health.
However, she suggested that expanding community services and focusing on prevention at a national level may be met with resistance from some members of staff, and will require a ‘charm offensive’ to bring teams together.
She told the conference: ‘There are going to be people in the health service who are saying “I’m so fed up and so annoyed with the way this service is being run, I’m so frustrated and never do the work the way I’ve been trained to do it. I’m not going to do it anymore – I’ve had enough”.
‘So we’ll have that. And we’ll have people in the community who will say “stop ordering us around – you keep telling us what’s good for us and what’s bad for us”.’
Lord Darzi’s review, which concluded that the health service is in ‘critical condition’, told the Government that increased funding for GP practices and community services is a ‘fundamental strategic shift’ required to save the NHS.
Professor Hawthorne argued that deprived practices in particular should be entitled to a ‘bigger share of funding’, but said that the ‘detail of that is up to the BMA to fight over’.
Alongside moving care into the community, the Government has also pledged to shift the NHS from ‘analogue to digital’ and from ‘treatment to prevention’.
