Our Strategy

 

Our strategy is to offer practical support to practices and Primary Care Networks (PCNs) in ways that will make a difference to them and the people they support, and to work on at-scale issues that will help the system work as a whole. We aim to deliver better integrated services, with surpluses reinvested in primary care locally.

The board has agreed three broad strategic priorities:

  • to be the 'at scale' primary care provider of choice for Brighton and Hove
  • supporting practices in very practical ways – enhanced access / bank workforce / hypertension / protected learning time / other services
  • supporting the delivery of the Sussex integrated care strategy and service delivery plan including:
    • Integrated neighbourhood teams
    • Data and Digital
    • Workforce

The Board also agreed the following principles:

  • B&HF should grow at a speed that reflects its ability to reliably deliver high quality services
  • B&HF should retain a focus on its geographical patch whilst participating in Sussex wide service delivery if appropriate
  • Any contracts B&HF engage in should be financially self-sufficient.

B&HF will respond to tenders for contracts (wholly or as part of a broader Alliance of Federations) that help us to deliver our purpose, and that are financially sustainable. We will continue to develop our alliance with other federations in Sussex and engage fully with the Primary Care Provider Collaborative when established.

The future

Service opportunities

B&HF is now well positioned to contribute positively to the primary care landscape in Brighton and Hove and to collaborate with partners. As a membership organisation we are uniquely positioned to provide services that are integrated well with primary care, reduce the burden of work on practices, support primary care resilience, contribute to relieving system wide pressures, and reinvest resources into primary care locally rather than support dividends for shareholders or directors of private enterprises.

Walk-in Centre and APMS tender

This is the key strategic objective of B&HF for 2025/2026. A tender response to provide this service over the next nine years has been submitted. A successful bid will provide a great opportunity to design a service that directly supports primary care, contributes to relieving system wide pressures, and enables us to start thinking about how we might integrate services more effectively, particularly in support of urgent and same day care.

The ambition is for B&HF to use its unique position to actively support the integration of a range of other services, including virtual wards, the walk-in centre, enhanced access, and the roving GP service (should it be tendered) that will benefit patients, our practices and our system partners.

Locally Commissioned Services (LCS)

B&HF has secured an agreement with the local authority for them to directly contract for local authority LCSs with us. We will be offering NHS Health Checks, smoking cessation, and statin requests. We are actively pursuing a similar arrangement for the ICB LCS’s.

We will be offering the Out of Hours Care Home LCS on behalf of practices that want us to do it under a sub-contracting arrangement. B&HF could offer similar support for other LCS’s, such as diabetes on behalf of practices.

The principles of working on this and other ICB LCS’s are:

  1. B&HF only work with practices that have not signed up, or do not want to deliver an LCS themselves
  2. Practice income levels related to the specific LCS remain unchanged, assuming current activity levels are maintained by them
  3. Any surplus made will be used by B&HF to fund additional primary care services

Virtual wards

There is a move to create GP led virtual wards, designed to avoid admissions to hospital. In collaboration with local federations, we are building an offer for SCFT to provide this for them.

Research

We are excited to build on our existing collaboration with the CRN and want to continue to develop this important aspect of our work supporting primary care.

COVID-19

We will deliver COVID-19 vaccines in collaboration with practices and other providers in the city

Wellbeing

Following the success of the free retreats offered to staff employed in practices in Brighton and Hove, we will continue to offer wellbeing services to staff of member practices. The offers include retreats, courses, and drop-in sessions to help staff begin or deepen a mindfulness & meditation practice.

System wide collaboration

We want to make it easy to work in Primary Care; and to help patients be better off as a result of the things we do. We also want to work with partners and build alliances on system-level issues to find effective ways of designing safe, sustainable service responses that really matter from a person’s point of view. We want to experiment with ways that teams might work differently in Primary Care, including integrated neighbourhood teams.

We also plan to join conversations about other practical collaborations and become involved in work that aligns with the broader strategic objectives of the Integrated Care System (ICS), including developing digital offers and supporting workforce development.