4 minute read
Right care, right time, right person
Features Editor Fabian Sutch-Daggett speaks to speak to Jyoti Mehan CEO of Health Care First Partnership Commercial Lead Dr Patrick Wynn about the need for global clinical standards in order to improve primary care delivery
Primary care is a subject that has been at the forefront of the healthcare discourse over the past few years. The level of investment, training, and dedicated primary care models have also been on the rise, and the all-important connections between primary care and secondary, tertiary, and community level services.
However, this is not the case across the globe. In many countries, developing primary care is not a priority - especially with the enormous and urgent need for acute hospital services due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Hospitals are still the forefront, and sometimes only, provider service which is used - whether that be for a routine check-up, management of chronic conditions, or simply for a bug that won’t go away. All the while, these same hospitals are dealing with critical patients, emergencies, and palliative care.
And it is easy to understand why this system has naturally emerged. Implementing a community, consultationdriven health service, providing the stages of care to meet the needs and requirements of the local population is a task that takes careful planning, assessment, feedback, sta ing, training, and of course, time. These concerns are o en not a factor when large population centres are in urgent need of health services - something we have seen firsthand in the UK and abroad in recent times with pop-up hospitals required to manage Covid-19 outbreaks e ectively.
Over time, without the correct primary care pathways for patients, it becomes all too common for highly-skilled clinicians and doctors to be occupied with conditions that they do not need to be treating themselves. This is a triple-edged sword too - if doctors and specialists are overburdened with procedures that do not require their level of expertise, those jobs cannot be performed by nurses or appropriate clinicians either - resulting in less availability for the doctors - and fewer jobs for nurses. Then, it becomes
incredibly expensive for the provider.
Health Care First Partnership is a primary care group in West Yorkshire with 6 practices, employing 9 full time and 8 part time GPs. “It’s important that patients understand the role of a primary care service,” says Dr Wynn. “It’s about the right care at the right time by the right person.
“If a gynaecologist performs a smear test, patients love it even though it’s incredibly expensive and a highly trained person is taken away from more specialised work. In the UK, a nurse will do the smear and it will be equally good. It’s a di erent way of approaching it, and it’s not hospital-centric.
“So if I was paying for a health service, I would not want to be paying for consultants to do smear tests, but rather, seek a primary care alternative. Equally, I wouldn’t want to pay for someone with a headache to see a neurologist as the first port of call. If you’re providing a state service, you require a primary care service to access the frontline and serve as the firewall that filters through appropriate sectors to then be seen by those specialists in hospitals, GPs and A&E.”
Yet, while the benefits of a primary care system are clear - it’s far easier said than done. Healthcare operators and providers may not even know where to begin with implementing a primary care system, or even creating the modelling necessary to start the strategy for one.
The Healthcare World Standard
Through developing a set of standards of best practice for primary care, markets that are looking to develop a system can share in the vast knowledge and lessons learned from the NHS in order to build a primary care framework from scratch without having to endure the trial and error of the past 75 years. In addition, these standards allow healthcare institutions to achieve internationally recognised levels of performance and outcomes.
This is where the Healthcare World Standard comes in. A comprehensive set of standards, tailored to every specialty, created by clinicians in collaboration with healthcare experts are designed to ensure a quality level of service that is measured and measurable. These standards are the explicit statements of expected quality in the performance of a healthcare activity against which these services can be evaluated.
The Health Care First Partnership is helping to shape the Healthcare World Primary Care Standard. “It’s not about imposing bricks and mortar. It’s about the expertise that we have from a primary care sector and then working alongside a market that is looking at primary care in its concept to share what we know and how to build it up,” says Jyoti. “This can be created as like for like or it can be built into the infrastructure that is already emerging within those markets.
“These standards exist as a document that defines what good looks like. It is a journey to be undertaken, and it’s about having the correct support around it. For us, we would have learnt more as a GP practice if we had had that guidance so it’s incredibly important.
“The NHS and primary care providers have been on a long journey to get to today and with all its flaws, it provides exceptional quality and access for patients. And that doesn’t mean we don’t cater to organisations and geographies. The Healthcare World Standard is a framework that needs to be tailored, which is where we are providing our skills and expertise.”
Jyoti Mehan CEO Health Care First Partnership
