Community Outpatients is a coming together of specialist consultants and primary care clinicians to deliver better care closer to home. Our ethos is based around joint working between primary and secondary care colleagues to give our patients the best the NHS has to offer as an integrated care team.

Our engagement experience with Clinical Commissioning Groups, PCTs, local Acute Trusts and Commissioners has ensured the redesign of any local service provides continuous improvement through innovation.

These partnerships ensure the appropriate communication and utilisation of any new community service, often a difficult challenge when a new referral pathway is introduced. It is imperative that local GPs understand and make best use of new community based services. We increase local GP knowledge and awareness of the new service(s) through educational sessions at cluster meetings, practice management forums, and directly at individual practice level where needed. We provide simple referral guidelines and clinical feedback to referring clinicians. By combining this with regular patient feedback surveys, we ensure continual improvement to every part of our service.

By introducing a referral management element to the service we will ensure that the pathway design is fit for purpose and accepted by the local acute trusts. Our implementation model integrates the pathways with local hospital services for imaging, audiology and clinical pathology. We work with commissioners in developing care pathways using well tested tools such as the Map of Medicine.