Modern General Practice

Both Sandy Health Centre and Saffron Health Partnership are on their journeys to meet the model of the Modern General Practice (MGP).

Modern general practice is the foundation of a transformation journey to better align capacity with need, improve patient experience and improve the working environment for general practice staff by:

• optimising contact channels; offering patient choice of access channel (telephone, online and in person) via highly usable and accessible practice websites, online consultation tools and improved telephone systems.
• structured information gathering at the point of patient contact (regardless of contact channel) to understand what is being asked of the service.
• using one care navigation (and workflow) process across all access channels to assess and prioritise need safely and fairly, and to efficiently get patients to the right healthcare professional or service, in the appropriate time frame (including consideration of continuity of care) moving away from a ‘first come first served approach’.
• better allocating existing capacity to need, making full use of a multi-professional primary care team, community services and ‘self access’ options where appropriate, and helping GPs and practice staff to optimise use of their time to where it’s needed most.
• building capability in general practice teams to work together and to access, understand and use data, digital tools and shared knowledge to lead, plan, implement, improve and sustain change.

Modern general practice uses digital tools, transformation support, funding and  incentives as part of a system wide delivery plan, which also includes expansion of clinical pharmacy and improvements across the primary care-secondary care interface to support general practice sustainability and primary care transformation.

You can view our findings for Year 1 here,