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Ensuring patients from a closing GP Practice get fair treatment

patients in GP waiting room

How geospatial can ensure patients from a closing GP Practice get fair treatment

Objective

GP Practices are at the heart of Primary Care, the NHS services which the public can attend without referral. Practices are often under pressure and occasionally, often at short notice, a practice needs to hand back its contract and close. This gives the Integrated Care Boards (the organisations who support the practices) the problem of what to do with the patients of that practice. It’s vital that patients continue to receive services, that they’re given a choice, that health inequalities are avoided, and that fair and accountable decisions are made. So how can this be achieved?
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What we did

Our geospatial team used its skill and experience and its geospatial mapping system, ArcGIS, in several important ways to ensure the best outcomes. Patients of the closing practice can be taken on by neighbouring practices, but only if the practices have capacity and the patients reside within their contractual boundaries. This was where our expert support could help.
o The first step was to use mapping to agree the correct boundaries. This was followed by running travel analyses of the time taken for patients to get to each practice to make a sensible estimate of the demand on each of the candidate neighbouring practices. This information was essential for agreeing how many patients each practice would be prepared to take on.
o The survey technology available within the ArcGIS system was then used to offer each patient options from a list tailored to their location.
o Finally, patient location, practice boundaries, survey responses and travel times were used in a dispersal model to plan the reallocation of patients, with each step being agreed with the ICB.

Activity

Geospatial services (GIS)

Our geospatial team used its skill and experience to ensure the best outcomes for patients needing to transfer from a closing practice.

Geospatial applications

We have a refined methodology for dealing with these dispersals and can agree and tailor a process as light or comprehensive as is appropriate

Data driven decision making

Our support helped to ensure that patients and their views were at the centre of any decisions about what happens because of a practice closure.

Outcome

Our support helped to ensure that patients and their views were at the centre of any decisions about what happens because of a practice closure. It’s important to inform patients about what’s happening and to do everything possible to present them with choices. To avoid inequality, it’s essential that everyone is given fair treatment and that the reasoning behind each patient journey can be described clearly.
Geospatial input enabled the ICB to consider all the options available and to understand patient views through the survey facility, then make fair and defensible decisions about what will happen to the closing practice’s patients.

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