Tailored ‘hands on’ support is available to practices and primary care networks (PCNs) to help implement modern general practice and realise benefits quickly.

This is divided into practice and PCN-level offers:

• Practice: three months of support with a facilitator.
• PCN: six full-day sessions with a facilitator, over a six-month period.

Practices can nominate themselves for support by registering to join our next information webinar: Support for practices – introductory webinar registration form (via FutureNHS).

PCNs can nominate themselves for support by registering to join our next engagement webinar.

Practices or PCNs participating in the support will need to be able to access data from their telephony system, so as to be able to plan and track improvement.

Integrated care boards (ICBs) have also been asked to nominate practices and PCNs who would benefit from support.

Support level framework

The Support Level framework (SLF) is a tool to support organisations in understanding their development needs and where they are on the journey to embedding modern general practice – as there is no “one size fits all” approach to improvement.​ The SLF has been co-produced with general practice teams. It has been clinically developed based on knowledge and experience, together with academic research and documented best practice where available. ​It allows organisations to understand what they do well and opportunities for improvement.​

The Practice SLF should be completed via a facilitated conversation with members of the practice team with honest reflection encouraged.​ The findings should then be used alongside available data to agree priorities for improvement and development of an action plan.​ The outputs of the SLF and action plan are owned locally by the practice. The SLF is not a performance management tool.​

There is also a PCN-level version of the SLF which will be used within the PCN support via a facilitated conversation to understand support needs.

ICBs have been asked to enable facilitated SLF conversations to take place in all practices, to help practices better understand their support needs and improvement priorities and to help ICBs provide the right type of ongoing support to practices.

Practices or PCNs that have not yet had a facilitated conversation using the SLF can still be put forward for the national General Practice Programme practice level support.