The Rural Alliance Primary Care Network (PCN)

The Rural Alliance PCN was established in 2019. Its members include the 6 GP Practices within rural Cheshire West who are working together to create a better future for their patient population:

· Bunbury Medical Practice
· Kelsall Medical Centre
· Malpas Surgery
· Dr Campbell & Partners
· Drs Adey & Dancy
· The Village Surgeries Group

The Rural Alliance Primary Care Network is one of nine PCNs within the Cheshire West & Chester Borough and its team members include:

· PCN Clinical Directors – Dr Alistair Adey & Dr Christine Snowden

What is a Primary Care Network?

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 from mental health issues and may need to access their local health services more often.

To meet these needs, GP practices are working together with the other GP Practices in their surrounding area to build on existing primary care services and enable a greater provision of proactive, personalised, coordinated and more integrated health and social care for people close to home.

There are 1,250 PCNs across England, typically serving natural communities of between 30,000 to 50,000 people (with some flexibility). They 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.

The short animation below 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.