Working better together

We are delighted to announce that the Academy of Medical Royal College’s report on the General Practice and Secondary Care Interface has been published.

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Problems at the general practice / secondary care interface are long-standing and well-known,?yet many challenges persist. Our report examples real-life bottom-up, solution-focused?approaches to bridge the gaps between the services. We highlight?local success stories?where interface issues have been overcome. We hope that by shining a light on these initiatives' others can benefit from learning about them, the process by which they were developed, and their impact – so that hopefully they can be adopted by others to encourage us to work better together.

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In Autumn 2022 the Academy ran a series of focus groups, bringing together over 100 stakeholders from across the four UK nations, to discuss successful local initiatives. These were followed up?with semi-structured 1:1 interviews,?where the details of specific interventions were explored in more detail. This resulted in more than 50 different initiatives that are catalogued in this report.

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The report presents successful initiatives as case studies, organised by the theme deemed most critical to the project’s success –?culture, communication or clinical process. Some initiatives improve more than one of these themes, some only one. But in each case, friction at the interface has been reduced or removed at low or no cost and are proven to work across the GP secondary care landscape.?

The report also categorises the initiatives using an operational index that aligns each project with a particular aspect of the patient journey.?This may be the most useful starting point for clinicians looking to address a specific local issue.

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We have tried to provide enough detail to allow clinicians to assess the worth of individual projects, without overwhelming people with granular detail. The Academy would be happy to be approached for further details on specific initiatives ([email protected]) and we may be able to connect you with relevant teams, where they have consented to this.