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- Our NHS our future: NHS next stage review
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- Primary care contracting
- The Innovation in Primary Care Contracting programme
- Investing in primary care
- Management of lists of primary care practitioners
- Primary care computing
- Primary care trusts
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Primary care
Primary care is the term for the health services that play a central role in the local community; GPs, pharmacists, dentists and midwives. Every citizen should have the best possible access to these services.
This section details the policies, initiatives and standing arrangements within primary care.
Delivering Primary Care
About Primary Care Trusts (PCTs) - responsibilities and accountability and information on how primary care services can be accessed.
Primary care contracting
Enabling the NHS to provide a wider range of services closer to where patients live and improve the quality of care provided.
The innovation in Primary Care Contracting programme
Encouraging and supporting innovation from PCTs working with entrepreneurial GPs and other primary care providers.
Dentistry and dental services
Supporting the NHS, dental care professions and other stakeholders to maximise oral health, improve NHS dental services and promote high-quality dentistry.
Eye care services
Documentation and communications about eye care services policy.
Urgent care
Case studies and practical advice to help SHAs and PCTs develop integrated urgent care services in their area.
NHS treatment centres
Offering safe, fast, pre-booked day and short-stay surgery and diagnostic procedures reducing waiting times and improving patient choices.
Management of lists of primary care practitioners
The list system is a framework within which independent practitioners are regulated by the NHS, poor performance is addressed and quality is improved.
Practitioners with special interests
Guidance to help PCTs expand the range of local services through the development of staff roles and expansion of physical capacity.
Primary care trusts
PCTs have control over local health care and receive budgets from DH. Strategic Health Authorities monitor standards and performance.
Procurement
Equitable access in primary medical care
Procurement framework to support primary care trusts when delivering local procurements.
Fairness in Primary Care (FPC) procurement: NHS primary medical care and related services
Tackling inequalities in access to primary medical care services in the most under-doctored PCTs in England.
NHS Local Improvement Finance Trust (LIFT)
Developing a new market for investment in primary care and community-based facilities and services.
Investing in primary care
Supporting local initiatives that further the goals of the NHS Plan and rewarding primary care initiatives that achieve locally agreed targets.
Primary care computing
Information on uses of technology in primary care, from the electronic prescriptions pilot scheme to computerised learning and support tools for GPs.
Complementary and alternative medicine
Recommendations, research and information on the use of complementary and alternative medicine within the NHS.
Additional links
Related Links
Reorganisation of ambulance trusts, SHAs and PCTs
Primary care trusts (PCTs), ambulance trusts and strategic health authorities (SHAs) are being reorganised as part of the Government's drive to create a patient led NHS.
Our health, our care, our say
This White Paper sets out how health and social care services will change in the future.
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