Since the NHS was created in 1948, the population has grown and people are living longer. Many people are living with long term conditions such as diabetes and heart disease, or suffer with mental health issues and may need to access their local health services more often.

To meet these needs, practices have begun working together and with community, mental health, social care, pharmacy, hospital and voluntary services in their local areas in primary care networks.

Primary care networks build on the core of current primary care services and enable greater provision of proactive, personalised, coordinated and more integrated health and social care. Clinicians describe this as a change from reactively providing appointments to proactively care for the people and communities they serve. Where emerging primary care networks are in place in parts of the country, there are clear benefits for patients and clinicians.

Derwentside Healthcare Ltd is a Federation of 12 independent GP Practices, covering 96,000 patients. Members remain independent organisations, whilst collaborating in the further development of Local Primary Care.

The Federation is designed to overcome the weaknesses inherent in an industry with a large number of small providers. The Federation facilitates practices to work together to jointly address issues which cannot easily be resolved by individual practices and offers skills and expertise that an individual practice would find uneconomic to employ, for example improving services for patients, bidding for contracts and sharing best practice.

• Provide a management infrastructure and address issues by collaboration
• Facilitate practices working together in an open, democratic and transparent way.
• Expertise that an individual practice may find uneconomic to employ.
• Help secure the long term future for practices within the Derwentside locality.
• Support practices to improve quality and address capacity issues.
• To build a sustainable Federation available to support Derwentside primary care in the long term.