The Department of Health commissioned the Primary Care Foundation to carry out a rapid review of urgent care centres in November 2009, to identify different models and evaluate their impact. We were looking for services that delivered high-quality, effective and cost-effective care and we aimed to collect information from the services to demonstrate this. We set the following criteria for this review:
Care should be provided promptly
Patient’s needs should be met and the scope of the service should be clear
Governance and management responsibility for improving quality and cost-effectiveness should be clear and exercised
The environment should be right
The process should support the features that we were looking for
All PCTs across England were invited to be part of the study with 27 expressing an interest. Ten were selected to reflect a range of different types of urgent care centre and different communities. Site visits included semi-structured sessions with commissioners, providers and, where possible, users of services. We also sought to collect a data extract from each provider summarising recent performance. Findings and observations were checked for accuracy with all services as well at a meeting of a national reference group, involving clinical and managerial leaders from the ten sites as well as national experts.
As soon as the report is finalised we will be publishing our findings in full on this website.
The Primary Care Foundation was established to support the development of best practice in primary and urgent care. The three Directors bring different skills and perspectives to understanding primary and urgent health care - for more details click below:
We also work with a number of associates
Our latest report ‘Breaking the mould without breaking the system: new ideas and resources for clinical commissioners on the journey towards integrated 24/7 urgent care’ is now available to download CLICK HERE. It is published in partnership with the NHS Alliance and will be formally launched at a session at the NHS Alliance annual conference in Manchester on 1st December 2011.
We are working with increasing numbers of practice to improve access and urgent care in general practice. If you would like to know more about our web based tool and customised reports based on a week of practice data and join over 300 practices across the UK,please email Rick Stern at rick.stern@primarycarefoundation.co.uk
For an independent view of our work with practices on access and urgent care CLICK HERE for the article in the HSJ on 24th November 2011
4th round of the out of hours benchmark. You should be receiving final data for validation soon and the first open set of openly available results will be available from this website in the New Year.