From 1^st April to 30^th June 2025, One Care’s HR services will be free to practices to assess the value in offering these services as part of member subscription.

One Care’s practice HR services cover a wide range of support, including:

• Employee relations support – assistance with managing employee stress, absence, and resolving problems
• Performance management support
• Disciplinary and grievance support – guidance, advice and attendance at disciplinary and grievances meetings.
• Advice related to employment termination
• Bespoke policies and letter templates
• Advice on contractual queries
• Mediation

Feedback about the service has been very positive, with one practice who has made use of One Care’s practice HR support commenting, “One Care supported us through two difficult HR processes, including a termination of contract. Gertruda and Lauren provided a fast and proficient service, their HR knowledge was excellent. They gave as sound and clear advice, as well as drafting letters for us. Thank you.”

One Care has received short-term funding to run this pilot. The subsequent inclusion of this support in the subscription fee will be contingent on sufficient uptake, so practices are highly encouraged to make use of it.

If you would like to make use of this free support, please contact One Care’s People Services.

Having an accessible, easily navigable website makes patients more likely to make it their first port of call for finding out information and getting in touch with their practice. As the healthcare system becomes increasingly digital, a usable website is more important than ever. Here are five top tips to make your practice’s website as usable for patients as possible.

Create an intuitive homepage and navigation bar layout

Studies by NHS England show the most important tasks to patients are being able to book, change, or cancel appointments; order repeat prescriptions; register with a practice; get a sick / fit note; get test results; and find out opening times and contact details. It’s therefore wise to have these links in the top third of your home page and in your navigation bar. However, don’t overload either of them – stick to what patients are looking for most often.

Check how your site looks on mobile browsers

The majority of people now access web content on their mobile phones. Check your site is still navigable via a mobile browser – ideally, get colleagues involved to check it on a variety of devices (older, newer, Apple, Android, etc).

Use an accessibility testing tool

The WAVE browser extension is a good starting point for picking up issues that people using screen readers might run into. Install the extension and look over your home page and frequently visited pages. If you see lots of errors, contact your website provider to try and resolve them. However, this doesn’t replace a full accessibility audit, which your website provider should be able to run.

Make sure your written content is readable to a range of patients

Did you know that the average reading age in the UK is approximately nine years old? Making sure the written content on your website is in plain English, free of jargon (including terms like ‘triage’ and ‘online consultation form’) will ensure as many people as possible understand the information, which can reduce unnecessary or confusing contacts. To test how readable your content is, try Hemingway.

NHS England also has some excellent templates for frequently visited pages, such as appointments and prescriptions, which you can adapt for your practice. (In fact, the whole guide is a brilliant resource for anyone looking to improve their practice website!)

Engage with your PPG

Your patients are the most valuable source of feedback – get their thoughts about how easy they find the website to use, and the changes they would like to see.

We hope you find these tips useful. If you’d like help to make your website more usable and accessible, contact Alasdair Wallace who will be happy to help.

Member practices told us they would like to have a named representative at One Care, who they could contact directly to ask questions, raise issues, or request support or advice.

In response to this, we’ve set up a ‘One Care contacts’ model, which sees members of the One Care team take responsibility for one or more member practices, being on hand to help with anything they may need.

That could be finding out the answer to a question, putting them in touch with a team at One Care who can help solve a problem, or giving direct assistance on something within their own expertise.

The model aims to build stronger, more consistent relationships between One Care and member practices, and enable them to access One Care’s services and programmes quickly and easily.

One Care’s Chief Operating Officer, Rachel Burton, said: “We hope our practice colleagues will find it helpful to be able to contact a specific person at One Care when they need something. Being able to build those personal, trusted relationships with members of our team will help members get the answers and support they want as effectively as possible.”

Members of our general practice and operations support team all have years of practice experience to draw on, and can help you remotely or will come into your practice to work with you directly.

The GPOS team’s work helps:

• support process optimisation
• improve efficiency
• manage, save or gain practices money
• release time for practices

If you ever have questions for One Care or need our help but are unsure who to contact, please email enquiries@onecare.org.uk and we’ll direct your enquiry to the right person, who will make sure you get the assistance you’re after.

As the end of the financial year approaches, advice from One Care teams can help you get ahead with your planning.

The data experts in our business intelligence team can help you understand your data for QOF, SMI and LD health checks, and for the investment and impact fund (IIF). All the information for this is available on your practice dashboard, but if you need help with it, please get in touch. The team can give you a more detailed picture of your achievements to date and any shortfalls, to make sure you’re getting paid properly.

Please contact business.intelligence@onecare.org.uk

Also take a look at the financial advice from our general practice support team on how to make a financial plan; maximise income streams; and reduce costs. The article contains plenty of top tips, with links to other resources for more detailed information.

Our GPS team also offers practices a confidential and informal review of your finances. Please contact practice.support@onecare.org.uk.

Both teams’ advice, support and resources are available free of charge, as part of your One Care subscription.

GPCB representation and action

Last year the General Practice Collaborative Board (GPCB) continued to strengthen ties with the wider integrated care system (ICS) to enable One Care-subscribing practices to participate as an equal system partner.

The GPCB represents the diverse make-up of BNSSG general practice; the board includes members from PCN and localities, both clinical and managerial, as well as Avon LMC, BrisDoc and One Care representatives. The Chair and One Care CEO have seats on the Integrated Care Partnership (ICP) Board and the ICB Board, meaning general practice is represented at the most senior level in the system.

The GPCB programmes and clinical leads have been instrumental in bringing practical changes and developments to patient care and practice management.

GPCB achievements in 2024 

In the last year, the GPCB has been a driving force on many issues faced by general practice, including:

• acute respiratory infection (ARI) funding: annual additional funding brought as business as usual to all practices to support with winter pressures
• workforce wellbeing, retention and recruitment: the workforce programme initiated workforce nominations, work experience, recruitment schemes and an agreed locum rate with agencies to support controlled workforce rates
• inappropriate work requests from secondary care: the planned care programme and LMC review inappropriate requests to practices identifying trends and feed back to the requester
• testing new and emerging technologies: the digital strategy team used local funding and brought in national funding to test technologies through pilots with member practices
• the primary and secondary care interface: GPCB clinical leads for planned care and urgent care work collaboratively across the system to create principles and ways to improve relationships across providers, and improve patients’ experience

Coming up in 2025 

The GPCB key priority for the next six months is developing ‘future general practice’ plans. This aims to put general practice on the front foot and align with government ambitions to move the NHS from ‘hospital to community’, ‘analogue to digital’ and ‘treatment to prevention’. It will also examine how we support the development of practices to continue to deliver effective care.

The GPCB feels it is important for general practice in BNSSG to have a clear vision for the future. Each locality will use forum meetings in early 2025 to discuss what the future should look like. Every practice is invited to send two representatives to the pan-BNSSG forum meeting in March to further develop these ideas.

GPCB chair: Dr Jacob Lee 

In December we thanked Dr Jon Hayes for his time as GPCB chair and welcomed Dr Jacob Lee to the role. Jake joined BNSSG general practice in 2011 and has been a GP partner, clinical guardian and out of hours GP for Brisdoc, and medical director for One Care. Since 2018, Jake has been a GP partner at Horfield Health Centre in Bristol and is the clinical lead for the North and West locality and chair of the North and West locality forum. Jake is an advocate of relational continuity of care for patients. He was the clinical lead for the BNSSG element of a Health Foundation continuity of care project, and gave expert evidence on its benefits to the Health and Social Care Parliamentary Select Committee in 2022.

Find out more about the GPCB on the GPCB TeamNet page and watch our short video explainer.