Opening Up Conversations To Collaborate For Collective Impact In Primary Care

With many health targets to meet and a stretched primary care workforce, ProCare is doing everything it can to support its practices and patients. One way of doing this is through sharing knowledge at the ProCare Better Together Collaboratives.

The collaboratives are back for a third year, bringing together teams from different practices to work in a structured way to improve aspects of their service to patients. The collaboratives involve learning about best practice, quality improvement tools, skills and change ideas, as well as practice staff sharing their experiences of making improvements in their local settings.

Bindi Norwell, ProCare Group CEO, says “Many people in primary care are feeling the pressure on the system at the moment, however, we know there will be some innovative solutions within practices that we hope these collaboratives will shine a spotlight on.

“By sharing these innovations in the collaboratives, other practices can use the same methods to save time, money and allow them to focus on supporting their community and achieving great outcomes for their patients,” concludes Norwell.

Allan Moffitt, ProCare Clinical Director, says: “In previous years we have had some fantastic results and feedback from practices who took part in the collaboratives. They had clear improvements compared with practices who didn’t take part.

“For example, last year, on our medication management of microalbuminuria collaborative, we saw an 8% increase in management by participating practices, compared to a 3% uplift for practices that didn’t participate. When you take the equity uplift into account, these are significant changes we’re making for patients and the wider community,” points out Dr Moffitt.

As part of the Better Together Collaboratives, practices get together at four 60-minute sessions over 6-8 months, share ideas about changes to test, and improve their performance on a specific clinical topic.

This year there are four Better Together Collaborative topics, chosen for their potential impact on equity and population health gain, feedback from our network and alignment with ProCare’s Population Health Strategy:

1. High grade overdue smears and implementation of HPV self-testing
2. Cardiovascular disease (CVD) management
3. Diabetes medication management
4. Gout

The collaboratives began on Wednesday 20 September with diabetes medication management with the other topics rolling out over the coming months.

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