This week we have a three-way conversation on the principles and practicalities of how to make collaborative working between practices happen. In one corner of the triangle we have Richard Taunt from Kaleidoscope Health and Care. Kaleidoscope is a social enterprise aiming to improve health through effective collaboration. In the second corner sits Ben Gowland who runs Ockham Healthcare, a consultancy supporting innovation in general practice and finally, pulling the conversation together is Robert McCartney of McCartney Healthcare Associates, experts in mergers and federation development. Struggling with collaboration in your area? Listen out for news about an exciting new six month training programme that could offer all the support and skills that you need.

Last August we spoke to Tracey Vell, Manchester GP and LMC Lead about the integration of services in Manchester as they piloted the draft contract for Multi-speciality Community Providers. Nine months on Ben catches up with Tracey to talk about their continuing progress; about the philosophy and the model they are adopting, about the impact felt by individual practices and about some of the key lessons they are learning.

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.

In a special Sixtieth Episode of the General Practice Podcast, general practice expert Ben Gowland answers questions sent in by listeners. With the questions chosen and put to Ben by recent “podcastee” Tara Humphrey, he responds on issues ranging from the attractiveness of GP careers, through innovations in patient participation and on to the threat (or otherwise) posed by Sustainability and Transformation Plans.

Dr Anne Smalldridge is the GP Lead for REACHE North West which is the Refugee and Asylum Seeking Centre for Healthcare Education. REACHE supports refugee health professionals who live in the North West and in this podcast Anne explains to Ben how the organisation was formed, how it operates and what impact it has on the lives of refugee and asylum seeking doctors, nurses and other health professionals.

Mergers expert Robert McCartney returns to us for a second podcast. In Episode 49 Robert looked at the challenges around arranging successful mergers between two practices. In this episode he and Ben discuss the “bigger picture” i.e. merging at a scale that sees general practice operating over a population of 30 to 50,000. They discuss the arbitrariness (or otherwise) of this number and provide some practical advice for practices wanting to operate within networks or localities.

Jonathan Cope was, last November, named as GP of the Year by Pulse magazine. It’s not difficult to see why. He is a GP Partner and CEO of the Beacon Medical Group in Devon. In this fascinating podcast (his third for Ockham Healthcare) Jonathan describes a range of initiatives within this very forward thinking practice; from the Primary Care Home to the introduction of a mental health service and from closer relationships with community services to the successful recruitment of specialist GPs…and much more!

Dr Mayur Vibhuti is a GP and Director of Medical Education at the IMH Group. In this podcast he talks to Ben about the clinical leadership programme IMH have developed with Keele University which is tailored specifically to the new generation of GPs. He also talks about the NHS orientation programme that IMH have developed for European GPs hoping to practice in the UK. They also look at the “generation gap” between older GPs and millennial GPs and how this might be bridged.

In this podcast Tara Humphrey, an independent consultant, tells us everything we need to know about Community Education Provider Networks (CEPNs). She describes these as “…virtual, nimble, innovative training networks to help promote, sustain and develop the general practice workforce” She tells Ben how they work and how successful they have been in supporting the creation of a culture of multi-professional learning in general practice.

In this podcast, GP recruitment expert Nick Mattick takes Ben through the six stages of a clear, planned recruitment strategy for GPs. He discusses the various on- and off-line methods of recruitment advertising, warns against some of the more common mistakes and explains that recruitment is, for practices, often an exercise in “sales and marketing”.

Sarah Deeny is one of the authors of a briefing by the Health Foundation called “Reducing hospital admissions by improving continuity of care in general practice”. In this podcast she tells Ben about how the research was conducted, what it reveals about continuity of care in general practice and what it means for patients and practices.

Joanna Munden is a GP Partner of a practice in Wallington, Surrey. In this, the final episode of our short series on Physician Associates, Joanna outlines why her practice chose to train and appoint a PA, the value that the PA role brings to her practice and offers advice to other practices thinking of doing the same.

Louise Ashwood, Anne Macrae and Paula Marsden are practice nurses who are also part-time lead nurses for NHS Lambeth CCG. They have been part of a programme in the Borough to increase the recruitment and retention of practice nurses, expanding the number of practices who offer placements and increasing the number of nurse mentors. They explain to Ben how this works in practice and the impact their efforts have had. They look to the future of general practice nursing and offer advice for other areas.

Rachel Tyler is a GP at Ocean Healthcare in Plymouth. Faced with their own GP recruitment crisis Rachel’s practice decided to merge and, at the same time, drastically alter the way they provided care to their patients; by splitting general practice into acute and chronic on different sites. In this podcast Rachel tells Ben how this worked in practice, how it impacted on GPs and about the introduction of new roles to support general practice.

Robert McCartney is Managing Director of McCartney Healthcare Associates Ltd and an expert on what it takes to make practice mergers work. A solicitor by background Robert has been involved in a large number of successful mergers and, in this podcast, he explores with Ben the challenges, benefits and costs of two practices merging and looks at the enhanced governance requirements of merged practices.

As well as being a practice nurse in south London, Mia Skelly has a Darzi Fellowship and is part of a project to boost the numbers of nurses choosing general practice nursing. In this podcast she strongly advocates for general practice nursing as a career, overturning some of the myths about the profession along the way and suggests some ways of how the crisis in GPN recruitment and retention might be overcome.

Dr Zal Alam is a Director & Intermediate Tier Lead for GP Care Services in Rochdale. The GP provider organisation has been instrumental in developing a care collaborative (with acute care, the local authority, the out-of-hours service and third party partners) that has established an Intermediate Care Service in Heywood, Middleton and Rochdale. In this podcast Zal tells Ben that the scheme demonstrates how integration can work in practice, how clinical leadership drives the collaboration and the impact of the scheme in reducing admissions.

Jonathan Serjeant is a GP and founder of an organisation called Here based in Brighton whose aim is to “…help people to live well”. Here have developed a system of workflow optimisation for GP practices which is “…a system by which practice administration staff are trained, and supported to read, code, and action incoming clinical correspondence safely and accurately” In this podcast Jonathan tells Ben everything you need to know about the system and it’s phenomenal impact on GP administrative time.

Jon Griffiths is the GP Chair of Vale Royal CCG in Cheshire and the presenter of a recent TEDx talk on why he chose generalism over a specialist medical career. In this podcast he explains to Ben his passion for being a generalist and how he developed the talk. He also talks about the reaction to his views on this and other subjects from fellow clinicians and others.