One Care has been selected by the Health Foundation, an independent charity, to be part of its new programme exploring how to increase continuity of care in general practice.
The ‘Increasing Continuity of Care in General Practice’ programme is supporting five large-scale GP practices and federations with grants of up to £250,000 to carry out targeted improvement work to increase continuity in their practices to help bring benefits to both staff and patients. Each project will run for up to two years. The programme has been developed with the advice and support of the Royal College of General Practitioners.
Our project is called “how well do I know and trust my doctor?” Modern GP practices are focused on extending access to care beyond traditional core hours and finding innovative ways of working at scale. However, this can impact on continuity of care and result in fewer people being able to see a specific GP.
Our project intends to redress this balance across GP practices in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire, with the aim of reaching a practice population of 400,000 patients. The project will focus on improving continuity by increasing the number of patients that see the same health professional or small team over a period of time.
The project team will work with interested practices to develop a bespoke toolkit (including a digital toolset, delivery model, training programmes and patient materials) that offers two approaches to delivering more effective relational continuity of care.
One Care will work closely with patients and practices to establish their needs and identify vulnerable groups that will benefit the most from improved continuity of care.
As well as improving personalised care and patient satisfaction across all appointment types (face-to-face, telephone and home visits), better continuity of care is expected to lead to improved staff confidence, efficiency and job satisfaction through improved engagement with patients.
This project is part of the Health Foundation’s ‘Increasing Continuity of Care in General Practice’ programme. The Health Foundation is an independent charity
committed to bringing about better health and health care for people in the UK.