Primary care network

NEDPCN

In general, people are living longer, and some are living with a number of conditions such as diabetes, heart disease, asthma and mental health issues. Primary Care Networks are groups of GP Practices based around a GP registered list of approximately 30,000 – 50,000 patients, bringing practices together in order to offer care on a scale which is small enough for patients to get the continuous and personalised care they value, but large enough to be resilient, through the sharing of workforce, administration and other functions of general practice.

The benefits of these services working together are: 

  • Sharing staff 
  • Better access to specialist health professionals 
  • Services closer to home 
  • Ability to share information and technology 

Primary Care Networks are an important building block of developing our current community services to support better delivery of hands-on, personalised, coordinated and more joined-up health and social care. 

The creation of PCNs follows the release of new guidance from NHS England on 31 January 2019 to support the delivery of the NHS Long Term Plan. This guidance included significant changes to the GP contract, including the development of PCNs. 

Our PCN Is North East Derbyshire Primary Care Network, which comprises of the following Practices

  1. Barlborough Medical Practice
  2. Killamarsh medical Practice
  3. The Springs Medical Partnership
  4. The Valleys Medical Partnership

Since NHS was created in 1948, the population has grown and people are living longer. Many people are living with long term conditions such as diabetes and heart disease or suffer with mental health issues and may need to access their local health services more often.

To meet these needs, GP practices are working together with community, mental health, social care, pharmacy, hospital and voluntary services in their local areas in groups of practices known as primary care networks (PCNs).

PCNs build on existing primary care services and 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.

Each of the 1,250 PCNs across England are based on GP registered patient lists, typically serving natural communities of between 30,000 to 50,000 people (with some flexibility). They are small enough to provide the personal care valued by both people and GPs, 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.

PCNs are led by clinical directors who may be a GP, general practice nurse, clinical pharmacist or other clinical profession working in general practice.

Over 99% of general practices are part of a PCN, who sign up to the Network Contact DES which details their core requirements and entitlements.

Find out more through a collection of case studies from across the country where PCNs are working to make a difference to staff and patients.

Watch a short animation that explains the concept of PCNs and how this new way of working enables health and other services to work together to provide better access for patients.

Please click here to download and view a copy of North East Derbyshire's Privacy Notice.