Howbeck Healthcare is currently working with its Federations across East Staffordshire Primary Care Partnership, North Staffordshire GP Federation and South Cheshire and Vale Royal GP Alliance on developing its ‘Working at Scale’ project, taking on board views and comments of local practices of what’s important. The ‘Working at Scale’ project will look at how general practice can collaborate as groups of practices, to manage the demands of a growing and older population, without losing the benefits of small practices. There are several models for how practices can work together. We will be working with our Federations over the next few months to look at formal and informal collaborations for back office functions, clinical services, workforce and quality improvement.
We will work to identify opportunities and ways in which working together can tackle workload and recruitment problems for some practices, support others with delivering more care in the community, bring in more income streams to general practice and help sustain general practice for the future. We are developing options for work that can be done across practices to support practice managers and GPs, in the short term, whilst we continue to work with practices on plans as a Federation for the long term, the main focus being supporting practices with what’s important to them.