Nearly all PCNs struggle with effective communication across the member practices of the PCN.  Despite each practice having representatives in PCN meetings, frequently practice staff beyond the practice representative are oblivious to much of what the PCN is doing.  How, then, can PCNs make their communication effective?

When considering this question most PCNs come up with a range of transactional responses. For example, we will add a section to the PCN website that all practice staff can access, with ‘how to’ guides for all the PCN services.  We will create a monthly newsletter to go out to all practice staff.  Or we will set up some additional WhatsApp groups so that people can learn about what is happening directly.

But despite the good intention, what happens is that these things make little or no difference to the awareness and understanding of practice staff of what is going on across the PCN.

The reason that these things don’t work is that communication is far more effective when it is directly between people.  Communication relies not just on the information being passed on, but also the person receiving it engaging with it.

This means that the PCN meeting is by far the most important when it comes to communicating.  The first question for PCNs to consider is whether attendees are engaging with what is being communicated in those meetings.  It is hard to believe that this is the case if the meeting is full of attendees on mute with cameras off.  Actively seeking feedback from all on issues that are raised is one way of building engagement with them.

The second step is to consider the practice representatives.  Who is coming?  Are they the right people to be attending from the practice?  Do they have influence back at the practice?  How likely are they to be feeding information back into the practice?  We may be getting information through to the PCN meetings attendees, but is it going any further?

Where this is identified as the issue, a good strategy is for the Clinical Director to attend a round of member practice meetings.  Here they can feedback the work of the PCN.  They can also stress that this should not be news to the practice as you would expect the practice representative to be feeding this back to them.  If they are open to it, you can then ask how they would like to receive this information more regularly.

Another key set of individuals when it comes to effective communication across practices are the practice managers.  A strategy that is proving increasingly popular across PCNs is for the PCN manager or Digital and Transformation lead to meet regularly (often weekly) with the practice managers.  This is particularly good because it keeps this key group of individuals engaged and up to date with what it going on across the PCN, and they in turn are best placed to ensure anything important gets onto practice meeting agendas.

The third area that can be targeted is PCN all practice events.  These can be held quarterly or bi-annually, and are best done on a face to face basis.  These are not a luxury, but should rather be considered as a vital component of PCN working.  They allow the wider membership of PCNs to review progress and agree a way forward, and (more importantly than anything else) they strengthen and renew engagement of member practices in the work of the PCN.  These events should always include a reminder of everything the PCN is doing/has done – while PCN CDs feel that practices know all this anyway, the reality is they often either do not or have forgotten and so a reminder is always useful.

Ultimately effective communication is a result of strong engagement from practices in the PCN.  Where engagement is good, communication is relatively straightforward.  It is where engagement is poor that communication is often difficult, and so rather than treat the symptom (poor communication) it is much better to treat the cause (lack of engagement).