Looking at solutions for the problems facing general practice and learning from those who have already got it right inspired Ben Gowland and his team at Ockham Healthcare to write a book. In his latest blog Ben explains why the resultant book should be essential reading for anyone with an interest in general practice.

General practice is a difficult problem to solve. Few now dispute the profession is in crisis, and yet despite the publication of the General Practice Forward View (GPFV) we seem no nearer to a consensus on what the future of general practice will look like.

When I left my role in the CCG I started by trying to really understand the problems general practice was experiencing. I visited a range of different practices and spoke to many GPs and found the problems were even worse than I had imagined. You can watch the TV documentary I made about this here.

I then started talking to people; to GPs, practices, and sometimes whole areas, who had found a way through the problems. There are nearly 8000 GP practices in England, and while many are struggling, some have found a way through and are thriving. I wanted to learn from what they had done, and I wanted to share that learning with others. In February this year we started publishing The Ben Gowland Podcast every week – short recordings of conversations I have had with those who have found a way through the problems general practice is experiencing.

As I listened to the experiences of both those who had found answers and those who were struggling, I was struck by the realisation in many cases both had tried to do the same things. Practices who were struggling had joined a federation but it had made no difference. Practices that were thriving had formed a federation and it had had a transformative effect. I realised there is no simple “answer” to general practice, no single solution that can be applied to solve the current crisis. How an answer is implemented is often more important than the answer itself.

So to find a way forward, a future, for general practice, I believe the best place to start is those practices that have made the future a reality already. Rather than starting with a hypothesis and testing whether it will work in general practice, it is better to start with what has worked already and try and capture the learning of how this happened for others. And to this effect we decided to publish a book, one that took real life case studies of what has worked in general practice, and then used those case studies to extract the learning for others.

In the book we have been able to capture the experiences of those who have made operating at scale work, and use these to identify 10 practical steps for other practices to follow. These steps are the difference between practices losing £20,000 each of investment in a new federation that never goes anywhere, to being able to reduce costs, grow income and manage workload better. They are not rocket science. They include things like, for example, ‘being upfront about the commitment needed for each practice’ and ‘ensuring the right motivation’ of each practice who you are going to operate at scale with, but they are critical to ultimate success.

Equally the book contains the same for introducing new roles, introducing new models of care, and it even considers how CCGs and commissioners can have a transformative impact on their local practices. The book starts with the case studies, analyses what they have in common, and distils the learning so that others can do more than find an answer – they can learn how to make the answer work for them.

The Future of General Practice: Real Life Case Studies of Innovation and New Ways of Working is out today (Monday 10^th October). You can buy your copy here. The future of general practice requires more than an understanding of what solutions can help. It needs an understanding of how to implement these solutions in a way that will enable a new future to be created. The book provides both.