PPG and Patient Update

Chester Central Primary Care Network now has formed a joint PPG for all of our practices called “Patient Champions”, to help us have better conversations with our patients.

Chester Central Primary Care Network Update. December 2020

This year the NHS has faced its biggest challenge yet. Coronavirus has led to a number of changes to our lives, homes and communities and has required an exceptional response not only from the practices within our Primary Care Network, but from our NHS colleagues up and down the country.

Thank you for the fantastic community spirit during these challenges times and for your understanding during the various changes we have had to make in practice and to our services.

Our practices still remain open and we encourage you to contact your GP if you have any concerns.

As we enter into the festive period, we would like to take this time to reflect and celebrate the progress and achievements that we have made this year.

Chester Central Primary Care Network Update. December 2019. 

PPG and Patient update.

We last wrote to you in June 2019 as we embarked on our journey as a Primary Care Network (PCN). So what have we been up to?

Our Network…..This is about our GP practices working together, sharing ideas and developing new ways of working. Our services continue to be in demand and as patients, we know you are expecting more, so our focus has been looking at to what we do and how could we develop new services to help or adjust what we do now.

Next, we feel we would like to have better conversations with our patients. We know our PPGs are pretty variable across our 5 practices, so we think we could develop a PCN PPG. As we grow our services a number of these will be shared across the practices. As a group of 5 practices we are committed to work more closely together. So, a Network PPG might be an option here. We are planning to have a meeting across all the practices. We have set a date for 4^th March. 5pm till 7pm. It will be at the Fountains building and we will order some tea and buns to keep you hydrated and energised!      

We have been fortunate to secure some new money for some new services. We will be engaging a new social prescribing link worker early in the new year and are aiming to commence a low-level mental health service by Christmas. We also have money to employ a new clinical pharmacist.

We also know our nursing teams and admin teams are under pressure too. We would like to think about how we could be more efficient. We will be starting to look in to these areas in January 2020.  

We know we have capacity problems at practice level, so we have been taking a greater look in to our information systems to see what they are telling us. We can then understand more as to what and how new services should be developed. We would like to develop more on-line services and for our patients to have more direct access to other members of the multi disciplinarily team. We would like to get your views here hence sharing this newsletter with PPG chairs and groups. We can discuss more we hope on the 4^th march. 

What else have we been doing? We had a staff event to see what our receptionists, doctors and nurses thought we could be better at. We have then created our vision and mission statements. See below.

‘Our vision is to develop a partnership between patients and their clinicians that together ensures high quality health service delivery, which are good value for money and meet the needs of the population of Chester Central Primary Care Network.

Our mission as a network is to ensure our communities receive the best evidence-based care possible within our available resources. We will strive to ensure that patients’ views are heard and that their journey through our local health and care system is seamless through integration and partnership working’.

We wanted to develop our joint working practices. So, we have agreed a Collaborative Framework between us. We meet each month to agree this new way of working.

In the meantime, may we take this opportunity to wish you a Merry Christmas and wish you very best wishes for 2020.   

Signed by.

Drs Aidan Magrath , Joint Clinical Director on behalf of our Network.

 Our key objectives.

• We will provide compassionate care enabling health and care to be more accessible and seamless.
• We will empower our staff and patients to develop and receive health and wellbeing services.
• We will work together and in partnership for our community.

‘Chester Care, Chester Compassion and Chester Community Wellbeing’

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July 2019

Working Together – PPG Update

Since the NHS was created in 1948, there have been changes.  The population has grown and people are living longer, many 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, practices across the country have begun working together with community, mental health, social care, pharmacy, hospital and voluntary services in their local areas, known as primary care networks.

The aim of primary care networks is to build on the core of current primary care services to support patients to make informed decisions about their own health and care and connecting them to a wide range of statutory and voluntary services to ensure they can access the care they need first time.

Our practices have a strong foundation to work from via our Fountains Care Community. As a Care Community covering a population of 38,845. We have been building relationships for the last 3 years and in the last year we have matured our approach.

We see the benefit of coming together and have named ourselves Chester Central Primary Care Network as the next stage in our evolution, to enable greater sustainability and improve patient care. 

By working together, alongside our patients, we will have the opportunity to redesign the way we provide services, working with our Integrated Community Care Team which will deliver efficiencies and improved care and mean that practice teams achieve a better work/life balance.

We hope this will foster greater retention of key staff groups as well as make us an attractive place to work and therefore make recruitment easier/more successful in future.  

You can find out more about primary care networks here: https://www.england.nhs.uk/primary-care/primary-care-networks/

We will ensure that the PPG’s from across our network are kept informed of the developments as we progress.

Signed by:

Dr Aidan Magrath

PCN Clinical Directors