About primary care home
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Primary care homes are leading the transformation of integrated primary care across England.
Developed by the NAPC, the model brings together a range of health and social care professionals to work together to provide enhanced personalised and preventative care for their local community.
Staff come together as a complete care community – drawn from GP surgeries, community, mental health and acute trusts, social care and the voluntary sector – to focus on local population needs and provide care closer to patients’ homes.
Four key characteristics
There are four key characteristics that make up a primary care home:
- an integrated workforce, with a strong focus on partnerships spanning primary, secondary and social care;
- a combined focus on personalisation of care with improvements in population health outcomes;
- aligned clinical and financial drivers and
- provision of care to a defined, registered population of between 30,000 and 50,000.
A video about the four key characteristics
Rapid expansion
NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens launched the Primary Care Home programme in October 2015. Fifteen rapid test sites were chosen in December 2015 following a rigorous evaluation process, involving health and social care experts, patient representatives and an evaluation workshop.
Since then the programme has rapidly expanded – in December 2016 another 77 sites joined and since then a third wave of sites have successfully applied bringing the total primary care home sites to more than 240 across England, serving 10 million patients and 17% of the population.
The number continues to grow. All the sites are developing and testing the model as part of a community of practice.
NHS Long Term Plan and other NHS reforms
Primary care homes are established primary care networks (PCNs) – the NAPC primary care home programme has been running for three years.
Primary care networks are the cornerstone of the new service model featured in the NHS Long Term Plan which was published in January 2019.
Many key Long Term Plan initiatives are already underway across primary care homes including a proactive population health management approach, rapid community response teams to keep people out of hospital, expanded neighbourhood multi-disciplinary teams, social prescribing and joint working with community pharmacy.
The primary care home model was also featured in the Next Steps on the NHS Five Year Forward View.
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