Welcome to Hounslow Consortium.
About us.
Hounslow Consortium is a primary care support team embedded in the wider NHS community infrastructure with access to support in areas such as finance, HR, governance, IT and contracts.
The core priority for the team is supporting Hounslow GP surgeries and PCNs. However, we are increasingly supporting more projects on a broader scale, always with the same ethos of enabling general practice to be as efficient and as a responsive as possible and making sure general practice is embedded into the wider health and social care landscape.
If you’d like support with a project, please do contact us at [email protected].
How it began.
Historically the GP surgeries and networks across Hounslow had tried to work more collaboratively at scale but struggled. None of the networks had sufficient funds to invest in the calibre of staff needed and this led to a lot of work being done by the GPs at weekends which was not sustainable.
In February 2019 the Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) seconded a core group of staff to the GP Federation, funding the team for an initial 18 months. The team all understood the commissioning system and had established relationships with the practices. The aim was to get efficiencies and professionalism from working at scale while improving the standard and quality of the work, for patients, practices, and the local primary care workforce. Another priority was to enable general practice to have a single voice, which was becoming more important with an increased emphasis on integration.
The result was that practice performance improved, their income increased, and they got regularly paid each month. The consistency helped increase buy-in to network working, as practices previously got paid on an ad-hoc basis and for varying amounts. The value of the consortium team was further confirmed when all of Hounslow’s practices voted to fund the team directly after CCG funding ended.
Since the consortium team was created, no practice has ended up in a ‘claw back’ position once the previous overpayments had been managed. Childhood flu vaccinations rose by a minimum of 11% in each PCN during the first year and pre-booster height and weight measurement achievement is now between 94% -98%.
Now, Hounslow Consortium consists of a central primary care support team of over 11 staff embedded in the wider community infrastructure, with access to support in areas such as finance, HR, governance, IT and contracts.