Supporting GP Practices, PCNs & GP Federations

Our Principles – why and how we work

• We are passionate advocates of primary care. We believe in the Starfield principals; GPs as generalists, continuity of care, health promotion, screening, pop health management, treating people not diseases.
• We believe in the partnership model of general practice – we believe at its best it is effective, productive and efficient however we are great believers in innovation and adapting to the world around us, so we embrace new models of working, esp. new AHPs.To support the model, we believe money and resource should stay in practices but in return practices need to engage, transform and level up.
• We feel that sharing back office and management resource is the way to bring practices together and that standardisation and harmonisation is important to ensure all patients get the same care and to enable primary care to deliver a consistent offer to allow it to be the provider of choice for services.
• We have no agenda around mergers or employment models. We believe that individual flavour and localism is important, but we can see that for some services there are benefits of working at scale.
• We aren’t interested in running or taking over practices or running clinical services, we mainly offer a ‘solutions’ service, not a consultancy service. We can also provide access to excellent staff though our wide networks, and we have many of our own innovative services that are available but not compulsory.
• We believe IT has the power to drive productivity and quality changes partly by helping deliver data that can support evidence-based care and also enable analysis of whether interventions work. 
• We aren’t trying to be public facing, so we are happy for PCNs and federations to white label our information and products if they want.
• We only work with those that want to work with us, we don’t tie anyone into long contracts and we are flexible and totally focussed on making a difference.

Howbeck Healthcare provides regular support to a number of GP Federations.

Our Federations vary greatly in terms of patient population, practice sizes, geographical deprivation and demography but they all have the same common goal of wanting their practices to work together.

Our experienced and innovative team are highly skilled in consultancy, profit maximisation, strategic planning and governance, bid writing, project management and learning and development. We believe in a network of networks model and help share information, resources, ideas, project and staff across our clients to help them maximise their productivity. We currently provide support to:

• North Staffordshire GP Federation – 76 practices with a patient population of 500,000
• South Cheshire and Vale Royal GP Alliance – 29 practices with a patient population of 292,600
• East Staffordshire Primary Care Partnership – 18 practices with a patient population of 150,000
• Mercian GP Network – 11 practices with a patient population of 88,500
• Primary Care Cheshire – 34 practices with a patient population of 250,000
• Chester East Primary Care Network (PCN)
• West Lancashire GP Federation

We have also worked with a range of other GP federations on a ad-hoc basis and are available for one off pieces of work.

Howbeck Healthcare also works directly with several Primary Care Networks (PCNs) 

These include:

• One Ellesmere Port PCN – A PCN in Ellesmere Port.

Our services include strategic advice, project and programme management, horizon scanning and solution finding, commissioning and creating products, sharing good ideas between clients, bid writing, HR support, providing contractors and project staff and supplying services including our Freedom to Speak Up service, our DPO service and our Trusted Third Party Benchmarking.

Primary Care Market Access Consultancy

Given our unique knowledge of Primary care we also work with a range of companies to provide some of the solutions that our clients want – either in advising them on how to change / adapt their products for our market or by us directly commissioning solutions. We have won over £3 million of new income for our existing clients and have created several bespoke products with partners. We are available for consultancy and in our horizon scanning role we are always interested in products that may benefit our clients.