NHS Alliance | Primary Care Today

- bringing together GP Consortia, PCTs, clinicians and managers in primary care.

NHS Alliance calls for shake-up of EU doctors' regulations

Under European Union rules, overseas doctors are entitled to practice in the UK without undergoing UK assessment or training - but the death of David Gray, points up the need for more rigorous scrutiny of overseas doctors.
Just Imagine...

By Dr Michael Dixon - Chairman NHS Alliance Just imagine if all community services were excellent, integrated and cost-effective. Imagine too that the workforce were positive and happy. Imagine all GPs, Practice Managers and Practices being enthused by their new ability to improve local services and develop health initiatives as practice-based commissioners.
New vision launched for Practice Based Commissioning

GP reluctance about Practice Based Commissioning must be further broken down if PCTs are to achieve world class commissioning status.
Customised help aids NHS Brent

NHS Brent is the first PCT to get customised help under the Department of Health's PBC Development Framework for Strategic Health Authorities, Primary Care Trusts and Practice Based Commissioners.
Patients need to be the main focus

Primary Care Trusts must get their provider functions right but in order to do so PCTs will need to focus on patient outcomes rather than scrutinising how to deliver on Department of Health guidelines, says the NHS Alliance.
Integrate or fade away

By Dr Michael Dixon. NHS Alliance's mission for 2009 focuses on just one word - integration. Primary care must be diverted by nothing else, while it concentrates on the dual task of better integrated commissioning and better integrated service provision.
NHS backs Kaiser Permanente

The NHS is behind Kaiser Permanente in terms of its progress in providing integrated care to patients and in developing integrated care systems to support integrated care. Whether the NHS should follow Kaiser Permanente’s particular approaches to integrating care and integrating systems remains to be seen.
GPs doubt safety of patients

The new NHS Standard Contract requiring hospitals to provide discharge information within 72 hours of every patient's discharge is not working, say GPs. One in four GPs say they have seen the safety of a patient put at risk because hospitals have failed to provide essential information when the patient was discharged.
Social enterprises - a rosy future?

Social enterprises may begin to flourish as the NHS makes the transition from being a provider of services to a commissioner, with non-NHS agencies delivering services with NHS values, says Mo Girach, NHS Alliance special adviser on social enterprise. But in order to succeed the NHS will need to embrace start up social enterprises and stay with them with initial contracts lasting at least three years.
LETTER FROM THE CHAIRMAN

By Dr Michael Dixon The past year has been dominated by strategy. The Darzi Primary Care Strategy gives us a good plan for primary care. It includes many of the ideas in our own report earlier this year "In Sickness and in Health". The NHS likes its plans but a plan, a plan of action and the action itself are three entirely separate things. And of the three, it is only action that speaks. Particularly in these troubled economic times, when the role of primary care is ever more urgent and important. Poet T. S. Elliott warned “Between the vision and reality falls the shadow”. Today there are four shadows of disparity and disconnection, that we must understand, recognise and sort if we really want to bridge the vision and the reality of current strategy.