Partners & Salaried GPs
There are other super-practices and federations in existence right now. However, Our Health Partnership is unique. And here’s why:
Firstly Our Health Partnership is one single GP partnership, combining 52 surgeries that:
- retain their own budgeting and operational autonomy
- retain their own GMS (and other) contracts
- retain their own local links
- maintain their own ethos and identity
This means a seamless change for our patients and no operational differences to GPs and practice staff.
Secondly, Our Health Partnership:
- has approximately 358,000 patients
- has 176 partners
- is the biggest single GP partnership, in patient size, in the UK
Thirdly, Our Health Partnership allows all our practices to operate as autonomous profit centres with budgetary and operational control within their unit. This values the differences between practices and their diverse populations and our differences in work practices and work life balance
The concept, developed by a consortium of concerned local GPs, is our solution to the ever changing and continual challenges that GP practices and the NHS face: whilst at the same time opening up tremendous opportunities for participating partners and for the development of both primary care and more specialist care services in our communities and closer to home.
Our Health Partnership is a positive and exciting development that is truly transformational for general practice in Birmingham and Shropshire. It is redefining primary care, creating something that is secure and reliable and innovative for patients and profitable for GPs. The Partnership allows general practice to grow and prosper and will put patients back at the very centre of what we do.
Why do it this way?
The rationale behind Our Health Partnership is to build on the values of traditional primary care but in a new structure that protects GPs and patient care well into the future.
Patients and staff really value general practice based in the community, with local GPs leading, running and working in their local surgeries providing long-term, continuity of care. It’s what we want and it’s what patients want.
However we know that GP practices face huge pressures and we know that the Five Year Forward View expects us to operate in a different way at greater scale and by integration with other health providers. The status quo is no longer an option, new models of care are the way forward. Our Health Partnership gives us the strength and stability to embrace and shape the future.
The creation of Our Health Partnership, allows GPs to become partners in an overarching business that can offer a range of centralised, non-medical services while local practices continue working autonomously. This model is allowing us to provide more patient service through an integrated primary and secondary care model, embracing the requirement to integrate more widely with social services and other community care services, which can only be done by large organisations, is more likely to smooth the transition – better for GPs, better for patients.