Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the priorities are for the NHS Primary Care Network.

The priority for the Primary Care Network (PCN) overall will be to ensure that it builds on the core of current primary care services by enabling greater provision of proactive, personalised, coordinated and more integrated health and social care. PCNs will take part in the Network Contract Directed Enhanced Service from July 2019. This provides funding for additional capacity in general practice, extended access and clinical leadership. The priorities for individual PCNs will be determined locally by their Clinical Director and leadership team, in close conjunction with their local authority and clinical commissioning group. These priorities must be within the context of the seven service specifications that are being published and which will set out what all networks have to deliver. The seven are focused on areas where PCNs can have significant impact against the ‘triple aim’ of improving health and saving lives, for example from strokes, heart attacks and cancer; improving the quality of care for people with multiple morbidities; and helping to make the National Health Service more sustainable, for example, by helping to reduce avoidable hospital admissions.

The specifications cover the following topics:

- Structured medications review and optimisation;

- Enhanced health in care homes, to implement the vanguard model;

- Anticipatory care requirements for high need patients typically experiencing several long-term conditions, joint with community services;

- Personalised Care, to implement the NHS Comprehensive Model;

- Supporting early cancer diagnosis;

- Cardiovascular Disease (CVD) prevention and diagnosis; and

- Tackling neighbourhood inequalities.

The framework can be viewed at the following link:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/gp-contract-2019.pdf