PCN Overview

The Warwickshire East Primary Care Network has been established to improve patient care by providing new services and staff, and also to build greater resilience amongst our local GP surgeries. Our allied surgeries include Southam Surgery, Harbury Surgery, St Wulfstan Surgery and Kineton & Tysoe Surgery.

We have many new members of staff joining our ranks as we work on building a Health & Wellbeing service that seeks to provide new methods of improving patient care, and offering greater support to those who need it most. We are also supported by a team of pharmacists who are working hard to make sure local prescribing of medications is both as safe and effective as possible.

We hope we can continue to build a service that will benefit many.

What is a PCN?

Since the NHS was created in 1948, the population has grown and people are living longer. Many people are living with long term conditions such as diabetes and heart disease or suffer with mental health issues and may need to access their local health services more often.

To meet these needs, GP practices are working together with community, mental health, social care, pharmacy, hospital and voluntary services in their local areas in groups of practices known as primary care networks (PCNs).

PCNs build on the core of current primary care services and enable greater provision of proactive, personalised, coordinated and more integrated health and social care. Clinicians describe this as a change from reactively providing appointments to proactively care for the people and communities they serve. Where emerging PCNs are in place in parts of the country, there are clear benefits for patients and clinicians.

PCNs are small enough to provide the personal care valued by both people and GPs, but large enough to have impact and economies of scale through better collaboration between GP practices and others in the local health and social care system.

PCNs are led by clinical directors who may be a GP, general practice nurse, clinical pharmacist or other clinical profession working in general practice.

We want to support patients to make informed decisions about their health care and to connect them to most appropriate health or social care provider to ensure health care that is timely safe and all encompassing.

Watch a short animation that explains the concept of PCNs and how this new way of working enables health and other services to work together to provide better access for patients.