Issue - meetings

To receive a presentation from Oldham Clinical Commissioning Group presenting a review of Primary Care in Oldham.

Mike Barker, Joint Strategic Director/Chief Operating Officer and Nicola Hepburn, Director of Commissioning and Operations, Oldham CCG delivered a presentation setting out a vision and ambition for primary care services in Oldham.  The drafted Primary Care Strategy had been written in the context and framework of the Oldham CCG Vision and Objectives and described how primary care services will work with partners and the contribution they will make to the following strategic objectives –

·         Clinical leadership – to improve the population’s health and drive better wellbeing outcomes;

·         Nursing and quality improvement – to ensure that services become the highest quality and safest in the region;

·         Commissioning operations – to deliver an effective and strategic approach to commissioning that focuses on tackling health inequalities;

·         Finance – to ensure that local health and care services are sustainable for future generations;

·         Strategy and support – to lead partnership working and collaboration across a sustainable health and care system; and

·         Transformation – to create a place-based health and care system that is closer to people’s homes.

It was noted that Primary Care, like many parts of the health service, was under increasing pressure and struggling to deliver ever more complex services.  In developing the strategy the CCG had identified a number of challenges in primary care which needed to be addressed, leading to a number of Primary Care Strategic Priorities being identified and which were presented under collective headings of Restoration of Primary Care Services and strengthening the foundations of Primary Care; Partnership working to reduce inequalities and improve health and social care outcomes; and Delivering Integrated Health and Social Care.

To deliver the strategy, Primary Care Networks (PCNs) would become the primary vehicle for the delivery of integrated primary and community care, with resources increasingly organised to respond to the needs and priorities of the people that live in each locality.  A key objective for PCNs would be to shift the pattern of care and services to be more preventative, proactive and local for people of all ages, working with other system partners to deliver more care at home and in the community, with people being supported to remain independent in their own home for as long as possible.  A number of measures that would be reviewed over time to measure outcomes were further considered and presented under headings of reducing health inequalities, access to clinical services, and workforce.

The Committee was reminded that Oldham, like all other Greater Manchester authorities, operated a Locality Plan that set out the health and social care priorities for five years.  The Primary Care Strategy followed the same principles for tackling health inequalities and also reflected the national context of developing PCNs, collections of GP practices aligned to local authority boundaries, to deliver primary care.  The health inequality challenge in Oldham could be represented by the expected 5-10% incidence of complex issues being as high as 40% in certain areas, pointing to the fact that a ‘one size fits all’ approach was inappropriate.  The CCG had a  ...  view the full minutes text for item 9