Overview: Community Services

Community services need to look carefully at how they can align their care with general practice lists.  The structure of the teams should ensure adequate capacity and enable regular operational contact between the nursing and therapy teams and the clinical teams in general practice.  The aim should be to ensure community services can support the practices urgent care response.

As we move towards commissioning 24/7 urgent care, all community services should operate around the clock.  There also needs to be greater standardisation of services so other  NHS services and the public can expect to receive a similar service at all times rather than a varying response depending on the skills and abilities of individual who happen to be available at any particular time.

To support this, good quality information, recording outputs and outcomes rather than just inputs and process, prepared in a consistent way across all services, would substantially improve the ability of services to identify areas of comparative strength and weakness.  The range and limitations of most information systems supporting community services remains a substantial barrier to driving forward service improvement in this area and improving the links with other services. 

There is clearly an opportunity to use Transforming Community Services as a lever for developing greater integration with general practice to create fully integrated community and primary care teams, closely aligned with social care.  We also suggest that given the slow development of information systems and meaningful quality indicators across community services in England, there may be more immediate opportunities to improve our the way we collect community data by monitoring these services through general practice systems that tend to be more advanced.