Our Primary Care Network aims to build on the current primary care services and enable a greater provision of proactive, personalised and more integrated health and social care. We are supported by practitioners in additional roles who allow us to provide bespoke multi-disciplinary teams based on the needs of our local population. By working together with local community services, this allows us to make support available to people where it is most needed.
Our multi-disciplinary team
Care co-ordinators
Care co-ordinators provide extra time, capacity, and expertise to support patients in preparing for clinical conversations or in follow-up discussions with primary care professionals. They work closely with GPs and other primary care colleagues within the PCN to identify and manage a caseload of patients, making sure that appropriate support is made available to them and their carers (if appropriate), and ensuring that their changing needs are addressed. They focus on the delivery of personalised care to reflect local PCN priorities, health inequalities or at-risk groups of patients. They can also support PCNs in the delivery of Enhanced Health in Care Homes.
Our care co-ordinators are: Anne Lawrence and Nicola Rhodes.
Clinical pharmacists
Clinical pharmacists work in primary care as part of a multi-disciplinary team in a patient-facing role to clinically assess and treat patients using expert knowledge of medicines for specific disease areas. They work with and alongside the general practice team, taking responsibility for patients with chronic diseases and undertaking clinical medication reviews to proactively manage people with complex medication use, especially for the elderly, people in care homes and those with multiple conditions.
Our clinical pharmacists are: Aisha Mosafeer-Soodhun (Senior Pharmacist), Louisa Law, Prema Lechumanan and Rebecca Barber.
Find out more about clinical pharmacists in general practice.
Physician associates
Physician associates are healthcare professionals with a generalist medical education, who work alongside doctors providing medical care as an integral part of the multi-disciplinary team. Physician associates are dependent practitioners who work under the supervision of a fully trained and experienced doctor. They bring new talent providing a stable, generalist section of the workforce which can help ease the workforce pressures that primary care currently faces.
Our physician associates are: Derrick Nettey and Nida Ahmed
More information about the role of a physician associate is available on the Health Education England website.
PCN paramedics
A paramedic in primary care can recognise and manage the deteriorating patient and can manage patients with long-term conditions, minor injuries and minor illness. They can also support patients who require wound care, have fallen, have MSK problems and have urinary tract or respiratory infections. Paramedics can supply a range of medicines through PGDs, including antibiotics and analgesics.
Paramedics can support PCNs in responding to on-the-day demand by offering Hear and Treat telephone triage or undertaking home visiting. They can also support PCNs to improve access to care by seeing minor ailments and injuries in surgery. Paramedics can support PCNs with the delivery of Enhanced Health in Care Homes and overall their intervention should reduce the need for admission to hospital.
Our paramedics associates are: Carly Scarborough and Helen Glanville.