Our Principles
Why and how we work
We work with nine Federations, with each of these operating in a Network of Network role with their local Primary Care Networks (PCNs), meaning we provide support/services to 38 PCNs. These are Howbeck Healthcare's principles explaining how and why we work:
- We are passionate advocates of primary care. We believe in the Starfield principals; GPs as generalists, continuity of care, health promotion, screening, pop health management, treating people not diseases.
- We believe in the partnership model of general practice – we believe at its best it is effective, productive and efficient however we are great believers in innovation and adapting to the world around us, so we embrace new models of working, esp. new AHPs. To support the model, we believe money and resource should stay in practices but in return practices need to engage, transform and level up.
- We feel that sharing back office and management resource is the way to bring practices together and that standardisation and harmonisation is important to ensure all patients get the same care and to enable primary care to deliver a consistent offer to allow it to be the provider of choice for services.
- We have no agenda around mergers or employment models. We believe that individual flavour and localism is important, but we can see that for some services there are benefits of working at scale.
- We aren’t interested in running or taking over practices or running clinical services, we mainly offer a ‘solutions’ service, not a consultancy service. We can also provide access to excellent staff though our wide networks, and we have many of our own innovative services that are available but not compulsory.
- We believe IT has the power to drive productivity and quality changes partly by helping deliver data that can support evidence-based care and also enable analysis of whether interventions work.
- We aren’t trying to be public facing, so we are happy for PCNs and federations to white label our information and products if they want.
- We only work with those that want to work with us, we don’t tie anyone into long contracts and we are flexible and totally focussed on making a difference.