Primary Care Networks
Since July 2019, GP practices are working together in Primary Care Networks (PCNs), to share their expertise and resources over wider geographical area. You can find details of each PCN here.
The NHS’s Long Term Plan, published in January 2019, aims to integrate a lot of services which have traditionally worked separately – like mental health services, physiotherapy and social care. By working together in a PCN, city practices will be able to offer you a wider range of services than they could deliver on their own, and give you much faster and more efficient access to the right care and support.
Each PCN will develop teams of healthcare professionals, including GPs, pharmacists, district nurses, community paramedics, physiotherapists and other health workers, to provide tailored care for patients in their community. A ‘Social Prescriber’ will be appointed in each PCN to help direct people to a whole range of nonmedical services, like social clubs, community support groups and exercise activities, that will help them take greater control of their own health and stay well.
In Portsmouth we hope that the developing PCNs will help to deliver the personal care we know is valued by both patients and GPs, and to have impact and economies of scale through better collaboration between practices.
Supporting Primary Care This Winter
Our member practices have been working incredibly hard throughout the pandemic to provide the best possible care for our residents.
They continue to offer face-to-face appointments in addition to telephone and online consultations, and the number of available appointments in the city is now higher than it was before the pandemic. And, like many other areas of the NHS, they’ve had to adapt and review processes in order to provide the right kind of care and appointments for their patients, alongside delivering new services such as COVID-19 vaccinations and booster jabs.
As we head into the winter months, when demand for services tends to significantly increase with the onset of cold weather and flu, we continue to support our member practices to ensure our residents receive the best possible care.
This includes:
• Supporting practices individually in order to:
o Review and respond to challenges at a practice level
o Create a degree of consistency with messaging around access and COVID restrictions
o Sharing best practice to enable quicker change and improvements where needed
• Continuing the development of Primary Care Networks (PCNs) in order to:
o Share resources and streamline processes within a PCN
o Create multi-disciplinary teams to ensure patients can be directed to a clinician who best meets their needs
o Work with locality teams to develop services for the local area.
• Developing city-wide services that may be more appropriate for patients than attending a GP practice. This includes:
o Working with partners including the Portsmouth Primary Care Alliance (PPCA)
o Strengthening existing offers such as the Clinical Assessment Service (CAS) and the Acute Visiting Service (AVS)
o Increasing workforce capacity in the city
Over the coming weeks and months, we’ll be meeting with our member practices, getting their feedback on our proposals and encouraging patient and public engagement every step of the way. You’ll see more visible work between the CCG and practices to highlight our zero tolerance to abuse against staff, the roles our multi-disciplinary teams play, and the range of services available to patients across our city.
If you’d like to be involved in our work to support primary care this winter, please get in touch – we’d love to hear from you. Please contact our Communications Team at pccg.communications@nhs.net
Our Priorities
Our main strategic focus is the Health and Care Portsmouth agenda – bringing together NHS and social care, for the benefit of people in our city.
We aim to design and deliver services and support for city residents, in line with the ambitions set out in the Portsmouth Blueprint – helping people to stay healthy and independent, and joining up care to reduce the number of times people are passed from one service to another.
Our current priorities can all be related back to our 20/20 Vision five year strategy, published in 2014.
That strategy had four overarching priorities:
- Priority 1. We want everyone to be able to access the right health services, in the right place, as and when they need them.
- Priority 2. We will ensure that when people receive health services they are treated with compassion, respect and dignity and that health services are safe, effective and excellent quality.
- Priority 3. We want health and social care services to be joined up so that people only have to tell their story once. People should not have unnecessary assessments of their needs, or go to hospital when they can be safely cared for at home or stay in hospital longer than they need to.
- Priority 4. With our partners, we will tackle the biggest causes of ill health and early death and promote wellbeing and positive mental health.
Our CCG also works closely with other organisations, outside Portsmouth. We have close relationships with the other CCGs in this area – serving Fareham and Gosport, and also South Eastern Hampshire – and also with the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Sustainability and Transformation Partnership.
Equality, Diversity and Human Rights
Our vision is to commission safe, effective and affordable health care services so that residents live longer and healthier lives – whilst fully recognising and valuing the diversity of the population we serve.
Equality is central to our work so that we commission modern, high quality health services for all. This means that:
- Taking account of the diversity of the population we serve, and the potential barriers some people face when accessing health services and how we can work to reduce these
- Tackling health inequalities and ensuring there are no barriers to health and wellbeing
- Ensuring our health providers meet the legal requirements around equality and human rights
- Members of the public have the right to expect the care and treatment they receive to be provided in an environment free from unlawful discrimination.
Our commitment is driven by the principles of the NHS Constitution, the Equality Act 2010 and the Human Rights Act 1998, and the duties of the Health and Social Care Act 2012 to reduce health inequalities, promote patient involvement and involve and consult with the public.
We use the NHS Equality Delivery System 2 (EDS2) to develop and prepare our equality objectives to:
- Eliminate unlawful discrimination, harassment, victimisation and other conducted prohibited by the (Equality) Act
- Advance equality of opportunity between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not
- Foster good relations between people who share a protected characteristic and those who do not
Please see our Equality and Diversity Strategy for more detailed information.
Please see our Equality and Diversity Annual Report for information on our equality objectives.
Accessible Information
The CCG works in accordance with the Accessible Information Standard to make corporate information such as leaflets, documents and electronic resources available, on request, in alternative formats. These include large print, Easy Read and braille. We also try to ensure our website is as accessible as possible.
If you have any information and communication needs to access our information or require communication support at our meetings or events you can let us know via email, telephone or post. You can also request information in an alternative format via our webform in our Hearing From You section.
