How Good Is Your Practice At Same Day Urgent Care? UK

Main Category: Primary Care / General Practice
Article Date: 15 May 2008 - 3:00 PDT

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If you reckon you're pretty good, the Primary Care Foundation would like to hear from you.

The Foundation has been commissioned by the Department of Health to carry out a national review of how general practice manages urgent care.

One of the most important elements of that is finding the best that GPs are already doing. So whether your practice focuses on easy access, rapid assessment, working with other agencies - or perhaps has developed new ways of responding to urgent needs, then Dr David Carson would like to hear from you.

He said:

"The attention has been mainly on diverting patients away from A&E and hospital care. What we want to do look at how patients might be identified and treated earlier in general practice."

For more details of the review go here Dr Carson can be contacted at: goodpractice@primarycarefoundation.co.uk Alternatively, you can call the Foundation's dedicated urgent care review phone line: 07594 357484

Notes

1. The Primary Care Foundation is led by Dr David Carson, author of the Carson Report on out of hours care; Rick Stern who is the NHS Alliance providers' network national lead and special advisor on primary care management. He is a former PCT chief executive. The third member of the team is Henry Clay, a management consultant and accountant with vast experience of working with NHS organisations. It is an independent organisation with a clear commitment to developing and spreading best practice in unscheduled, emergency and primary care.

2. The review aims to understand how practices manage same day care, to identify best practice for the future and to prepare a toolkit that will support its delivery. In addition to establishing what works best in general practice, it will assess the current process in five PCTs across the country. The final stage will be to identify and enroll ten GP practices to test new ways of working.

NHS Alliance