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News & Views

Primary Care: A Framework for the Future Conference proceedings by the Primary Care Partnership

HSE DG Tony O'Brien at Partnership in Primary Care Conference

The inaugural ‘Primary Care Partnership’ conference took place in Maynooth in

January of this year. The aim was working together to prepare a plan to meet some

of the many challenges facing the Irish health system. A range of areas and issues

facing primary care now and into the future were discussed and solutions proposed.

​

The areas covered were as follows:

  • How primary care teams can better function with improved access to

       health and social care services;

  • Improving primary care access for home/residential care;

  • Prevention is the cure/Healthy Ireland;

  • Integrating primary care and maximising technology: data protection,

       patients and technology;

  • Prioritisation of patients/managing the overload; 

  • General practice/ambulatory care/emergency departments;

  • Improving patient care in rural Ireland;

  • Improving patient care in an urban deprived environment; and

  • Primary care – a vision for the future.

 

The resulting document; ‘Primary Care: A Framework for the Future’ is now available. It is the hope of the Primary Care Partnership that this will provide stakeholders with a ‘document to engage in confronting the challenges facing the Irish health system’.

 

Of particular interest is the chapter on ‘Improving patient care in an urban deprived environment’, here the framework specifically notes the difficulties faced by marginalised urban communities and the difficulty recruiting and keeping younger GPs in these areas; one of the main reasons being that young GPs ‘don’t have the requisite skills’. It is highlighted in the report that ‘the North Dublin GP raining Scheme is having a small but effective impact on training GPs to tackle these specialised problems’ (page 19).

 

The report also goes on to recommend that ‘The skills that are being passed on in the North Dublin City GP Training Scheme need to be more widely distributed’ (page 20).

 

You can read the full document here: http://nagp.ie/images/uploads/general/PrimaryCarePartnership.pdf

 

(PHE staff writers: uploaded 13.06.6)

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