Primary Care
What we said*
1
Healthy Ambitions highlighted the importance of strong primary care across all clinical pathway groups. Primary Care is the first port of call for the vast majority of service users in the region and accounts for over 90% of patient contacts with the NHS. The importance of primary care in the orginal Healthy Ambitions work led to the establishment of a ‘primary care think-tank’ with the same status as the eight clinical pathway groups. Our aim is to see universally high quality primary care that is flexible to respond to patients’ needs, regardless of where, when or to whom they are delivered.
While there are numerous examples of good practice in primary care across the region, there is also evidence of unacceptable variations in quality, access and patient experience of services.
The ‘primary care think-tank’ put forward a range of proposals for improving quality and tackling variation in primary care across the region.
These included:
- Strengthening commissioning of primary care to maximise the benefit from the levers to improve quality
- Supporting greater public and patient involvement in services and greater choice
- Improving the availability of information to allow comparison and benchmarking, to support more informed commissioning decisions, and to allow patients to make more informed choices.
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