Source · Select Committees · Health and Social Care Committee
Recommendation 24
24
Deferred
Paragraph: 92
Routine measurement of continuity of care is essential for improvement efforts and targeted support.
Conclusion
Unless continuity of care is routinely measured GP practices and Primary Care Networks will be unable to identify where to focus improvement efforts. NHS England will also be unable to effectively target support without establishing a baseline for the provision of continuity of care. Measuring the proportion of appointments delivered by a named GP is simple and easily understood and could potentially allow for some international comparisons to be made. While this would introduce an additional reporting requirement on GPs, we believe this is proportionate to the importance of continuity of care and would be accounted for by implementing our other recommendations on the GP workload. This could initially be rolled out at primary care network level to allow support and then be phased into individual practices by 2024.
Government response summary AI-generated
The government partially accepts but deflects the recommendation, discussing existing funding mechanisms like the Carr-Hill formula, which it states will not be changed until the end of 2023/24, instead of addressing the routine measurement of continuity of care.
Summary of the government's response below — read the verbatim text to verify.
Paragraph Reference:
92
Government Response
Deferred
HM Government · verbatim extract
Deferred
Partially accept. The Department partially accepts this recommendation. We agree that continuity of care is important in general practice, and we are introducing methods to further promote continuity of care in general practice to help ensure more patients can benefit from it when appropriate. We will consider how best to measure continuity of care, but we do not agree with the specific approach described. Firstly, continuity of care would need to be accurately defined for a national measure to be practicable. Alongside an individual GP or doctor, a multi- disciplinary team can provide continuity of care to a patient, leveraging their combined skills and offering continuity as a team, and we would want a measure to reflect this. The two measures proposed above do not do this. In addition, any national measure of continuity of care in general practice would need to be designed carefully to ensure that increased continuity of care is provided to those patients who most need it, while ensuring practices are not constrained from making best use of the skills and time of their general practitioners and multidisciplinary teams to meet their patients’ needs. While we will consider whether it is practicable to introduce a measure which achieves these aims, it would not therefore be appropriate to commit to introducing a measure by 2024.
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