Summary
GP practices are usually run separately from hospitals. In some places in England and Wales, the NHS organisations responsible for managing hospitals are now also running local GP practices. It is difficult in some areas for practices, which are small organisations, to recruit GPs and keep going. It is also desirable to coordinate GP services with hospital care. For these reasons, it may help if the organisations managing hospitals also run GP practices.
Content
This study from Manbinder Sidhu and Jack Pollard investigated: what specifically has led to hospitals and GP practices being run by the same organisation; how it is done; the expectations of the GPs and NHS managers who made it happen; whether those expectations are being fulfilled; and whether there are any other consequences.
To do this, they have interviewed GPs, NHS managers and other staff, 52 people in all, at two locations in England and one in Wales. They have also observed management meetings and reviewed documents referred to by interviewees.
They found that the dominant reason for hospitals to run GP practices was to enable some practices that would otherwise have closed to keep going. This has so far been successful. These practices are also increasingly able to offer patients the opportunity to consult a range of health care professionals at the local practice, not just GPs, but also staff with special training to provide specific types of health care, for example, for diabetes or for problems with joint pain. Various legal arrangements were developed in different places to enable hospitals to run GP practices, including setting up an NHS-owned company and making the practices part of an existing NHS organisation.
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