Primary care services provide the first point of contact for patients in the healthcare system, acting as the ‘front door’ of the NHS.
Primary care services include general practice (your local GP or family doctor), community pharmacies, dentists, and optometry (eye health) services.
The way in which primary care services are delivered in north east London is changing. We need to ensure that services now, and in the future, can meet the needs of our diverse and growing population.
We want to ensure that wherever you live in north east London, you can access consistent high-quality services from a dedicated, motivated and multi-skilled workforce enabling local people to live their healthiest lives.
We want to ensure patients with diverse needs have a wider choice of personalised, digital-first health services, and we will achieve that through more collaboration with partners across the health and social care and communities.
Our plan for transforming and improving primary care is driven by the following five strategic goals:
Supporting patients to manage their own health, stay healthy and access services.
Developing new and digital tools to support highly responsive quality care
Providing a range tools and extending services and assistance to respond to patient needs
Reduced workload across interfaces between primary and secondary care services, improving efficiency, and supporting sustainable ways of working.
Supporting staff recruitment, retainment and putting plans in place that will help improve job satisfaction, appointment availability and flexibility.
How we will achieve our goals is through the following programmes of work, designed to improve the care you receive in your community and how different services and health professionals work together to do that.
Supporting all of our places to have well established networks of GP practices to support Integrated Neighbourhood Teams.
Ensuring patients have access to primary care services in the evenings and at weekends, and that these are linked in with NHS 111 and urgent and emergency care services
Working to end the 8am rush to get an appointment, digital access will be improved for patients and staff, including digital telephone systems in all practices.
Increasing recruitment and improving retention, job satisfaction, appointment availability, flexibility, training and opportunities.
Working with GP practices to ensure they have sustainable premises and relocating practices to new modern fit for purpose community properties, where appropriate.
Reviewing expenditure to ensure value for money.
