A Primary Care Network is a group of GP surgeries that work together alongside local mental health, social care, pharmacy, hospital and voluntary services to build on exising primary care services and enable greater provision of proactive, personalised, coordinated and more integrated health and social care for patients.
There are 1250 PCNs across England, usually serving communities of around 30,000 to 50,000.
PCN Projects
PCN and practice staff are engaged in multiple projects.
Friends of Foundry
Friends of Foundry is service offered by Foundry PCN staff to support our local community. We run weekly drop-in sessions at Verdon Street Recreation Centre with free hot meals. Our aim is to help people to get the financial, housing, health, and social support they need.
Sheffield United Community Foundation joins us at the drop-ins every week to do some gentle exercises. Lots of local organisations also often join us, such as Wild at Heart, Stop Smoking, and Diabetes UK.
Care Navigation
We have developed a Care Navigation template that has successfully been rolled out to two of our eight practices, and is gradually being introduced to the remaining six practices.
This template supports practice staff to signpost patients to various types of support to help manage a wide range of needs. This might include referrals to our Social Prescribing Link Workers, Community Pharmacies, District Nurses, financial support services, and many more.
Cancer Champion
We’ve been successful in securing some funding to employ a Cancer Champion to work with communities within our Network to support people to access cancer screening. We have successfully recruited Farah Akhtar, one of our Care Coordinators, to work on the project one day a week for 12 months.
Farah has already made great links within our communities and her first mission was delivering some cancer screening information sessions for both men and women at our local Mosque.
Greener Prescribing
We embarked on a Greener Prescribing project in the Summer of 2022 to deliver high quality and low carbon asthma care while reducing our carbon emissions. Asthma Champions across all of our practices have been educating patients with asthma about different types of inhalers, and have supported patients that are clinically suitable to move to lower-carbon inhalers.
The Primary Care-Schools collaborative project, which aims to aspire towards careers in primary care, is now off the ground with a group of Y10 pupils from Firvale School attending Pitsmoor surgery in June for an entertaining afternoon of talks, practical sessions & Q&A with a range of people from the primary care team. We plan to continue this on a rolling rota and look forward to working with and inspiring more young people to think about working in primary care in the future.
Type-2 Diabetes
The Network has secured a one-off pot of money to support practices to deliver T2D health checks. We’re currently in the process of arranging the checks and hope to support more patients to have their health checks over the coming months.
Completed projects
Deep End SCC students
Several of our PCN practices were involved in hosting Deep End SSC medical students, giving them experience in a Primary Care setting as well as knowledge of local charities and organisations that support our patients. The students spent time shadowing not only practice GPs, but also spent some time with staff such as Social Prescribing Link Workers, Emotional Wellbeing Workers, and reception staff to give them a holistic view of a Primary Care setting. Our PCN Manager also supported the students in arranging short work experiences opportunities with the local community and volunteer sector.
The feedback was hugely positive from the students and hopefully we’re inspiring them to be the Deep End GPs of the future!
