Transforming Primary Care

About us

The Transforming Primary Care Programme has been established to transform London’s experience of primary care. It was originally established to help deliver a new offer for patients with the aim of working with local areas to realise the vision laid out in the London Strategic Commissioning Framework, GP Forward View, Planning Guidance and local primary care strategies. The recent publication of the Long Term Plan and the new GP contract have introduced new areas of focus which have been incorporated into the programme

The Transforming Primary Care Programme supports London area sustainability and transformation partnerships (STPs) with the delivery of the next steps on the NHS Five Year Forward View.  It supports the delivery of more convenient patient access to care, a stronger focus on population health and prevention, more GPs and a wider range of practice staff, operating in more modern buildings, better integrated with community and preventive services, hospital specialists and mental health care.

Our aim is to empower, connect and accelerate systems. To see our core offer, click here

Find out more about Next Steps Commissioning Framework, Resources and Toolkit

You can see the main focuses for our work by clicking the buttons below and also read  more about the exciting development of primary care networks.  If you require any further information please contact the team: england.londonprimarycaretransformation@nhs.net

Primary Care Networks

Since the NHS was created in 1948, the population has grown and people are living longer. Many people are living with long term conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, or suffer with mental health issues and may need to access their local health services more often.

To meet these needs, practices have begun working together and with community, mental health, social care, pharmacy, hospital and voluntary services in their local areas in primary care networks.

Primary care networks build on the core of current primary care services and enable greater provision of proactive, personalised, coordinated and more integrated health and social care. Clinicians describe this as a change from reactively providing appointments to proactively care for the people and communities they serve. Where emerging primary care networks are in place in parts of the country, there are clear benefits for patients and clinicians.

Refreshing NHS Plans for 2018-19 set out the ambition for CCGs to actively encourage every practice to be part of a local primary care network so that these cover the whole country as far as possible by the end of 2018/19. Primary care networks will be based on GP registered lists, typically serving natural communities of around 30,000 to 50,000. They should be small enough to provide the personal care valued by both patients and GPs, but large enough to have impact and economies of scale through better collaboration between practices and others in the local health and social care system.

Read this case study to find out more about how GP practices are joining up in London.

Watch a short animation that explains the concept of primary care networks (PCNs) and how this new way of working enables health and other services to work together to provide better access for patients.