The Government's report, NHS Next Stage Review: Our Vision for Primary and Community Care, outlines the future direction for developing and delivering primary care services. This page outlines the key areas for primary care contracts.
Broad focus
This report focuses on four areas:
- People shaping services - that are more responsive to patients' needs and views
- Promoting healthy lives - to promote health and wellbeing in local communities
- Continuously improving quality - focusing on professional development, clinical quality, productivity and patient experience
- Local change - supporting PCTs and clinicians in developing more integrated primary and community care services
Areas for primary care contracts
The report includes a number of areas that may have implications for our work on both the GMS contract and contractual framework for pharmacists. These are:
- changes to the national GP patient survey - from 2009 the survey will ask a much broader range of questions about the quality of services so that practices which best respond to patients' views can be recognised and rewarded
- the extension of patient choice in primary medical care - developing a fairer funding system that channels resources into fair payments based on the needs of the local population, rather than historic income guarantees
- the provision of flexible access to a range of primary care services
- the growth of the role of community pharmacies - offering treatment for minor ailments, health promotion services and advice on taking medicines, especially for those newly prescribed for a long tem condition, described in the recent White Paper on pharmacy
- personalised care plans - to be offered to everyone with a long term condition by 2010
- developing of a national programme of vascular risk assessment - for people aged between 40 and 74, and delivered in a range of community settings including general practice and community pharmacy
- improving access to a range of healthy living services - to help people give up smoking, control alcohol use and improve diet or exercise
- introducing annual health checks - for people with learning disabilities
- improving recording of data on ethnicity and first language - so that GP practices are better able to assess how far they are achieving equitable uptake of services
- developing QOF to give better incentives for maintaining good health as well as good care - QOF should also better reflect the prevalence of illnesses amongst the populations served by different GP practices. There will also be the development of a fresh strategy for developing the QOF:
- proposal for NICE to oversee the process for developing and reviewing indicators - discussions with the profession would consider how the number of organisational or process indicators could be removed so that resources could be focused on indicators that promote health and greater clinical quality
- flexibility for local NHS on indicators - to work with local practices to select quality indicators that reflect local improvement priorities
- how patient reported outcome measures (PROMs) could enhance the overall indicators of quality
- improving comparative data on quality - available for patients and clinicians
- developing indicators for the quality of pharmaceutical services - discussed in the pharmacy White Paper
- developing an accreditation scheme for GP practices - to be rolled out nationally by 2010
- Care Quality Commission to be responsible for assuring essential requirements of safety and quality for all GP practices
