Dillon Sykes is the Managing Director of Productive Primary Care Ltd, a GP-led consultancy most famous for its Doctor First product. Doctor First is a demand-led appointment system where clinicians talk to all patients before the decision to offer an appointment is made. In this podcast Dillon tells Ben how the system works, the practices for whom it might work best and the ways in which it can be adapted.

Could the way general practice operates on the other side of the world teach us anything about general practice in Britain? In this podcast (the first in a pair) Ben talks to Helen Parker who was an experienced nurse, manager and academic in England but who has, for the past four years, worked in New Zealand for the Pinnacle network of GP practices. In this podcast Helen discusses how the non-statutory nature of the network influences the way it works, how co-payments in NZ operate and what of this, if anything, might work in the UK.

Nish Manek is a GP trainee. She is also, for this year, on the prestigious National Medical Director’s Clinical Fellow scheme – which is designed to fast track doctors in training “…who present with the clearest potential to develop as medical leaders of the future”. In this role she is spending 12 months working alongside Dr Arvind Madan, NHS England’s Director of Primary Care. In this podcast Nish eloquently and enthusiastically advocates for general practice as a career and outlines her hopes and expectations for the future. She explains the benefits of being on the Clinical Fellow scheme and talks about Next Generation GP, the programme she has co-developed for aspiring leaders in general practice.

Implementing active signposting into a practice can divert up to 25% of GP appointments away from GPs and on to other appropriate health services. This is the claim made by Nick Sharples of DNA Insight, the company that runs the “Reception Plus” training programme for care navigators. In this podcast Nick explains how active signposting works and how it can be implemented into a practice. He also touches on reducing DNAs, another strand of his company’s work.

Rebecca Thomas is the Health Service Journal’s lead reporter for primary care. In this podcast Ben reverses traditional roles and questions the questioner. Rebecca tells Ben about how her stories are pursued and put together, she give advice for GPs in dealing with the media and she looks forward to the likely focus of journalistic interest in the coming months.