Primary care and strategic estates strategy are two of the areas flagged in the new NHS mandate for 2017-18.
The mandate – the annual document setting out the government’s expectations of the health service – again highlights requirements on moving services closer to home, expanding the primary care workforce and ensuring every CCG is planning for the future of its estate.
The mandate’s requirements this year include:
- Concrete progress on local Sustainability and Transformation Plans
- More services provided out of hospitals
- A larger primary care workforce and increased productivity
- Easier and more convenient access to planned GP services, including appointments in the evenings and at weekends
- A strategic estates strategy in every CCG that will help release surplus NHS land for new homes and capital receipts by 2020.
Our Property Director, Andrew Darke, says: “The new NHS mandate keeps primary care front and centre of the government’s plan to move services out of hospital and closer to home – but GPs need the right buildings in the right places if these plans are to reach their full potential.
“If primary care is going to give patients easier access to appointments, support technology to help people access health services in different ways and employ more staff, we need an estate that’s fit for the task.
“With so many GP surgeries reporting that their buildings are unfit for purpose, there’s a huge challenge ahead for STPs to make sure family doctors and wider community health teams have the premises they need, in the right places for patients – and that GPs are getting support to make existing buildings work as hard as possible.”
Assura invest, develop and manage bespoke primary and community care premises that meet the exacting and demanding needs of the NHS and the patients. We work with GPs and stakeholders to enable the provision of additional community based clinical services to patients from modern compliant future proofed premises. We focus on what matters to patients, GP’s and health professionals and plan for what will be needed in the future. We believe patients and health professionals deserve modern primary care premises from which they can receive and provide high quality care.