Much of the strength of general practice comes from its autonomy.  While the rest of the NHS totters under the weight of being part of one of the largest centralised systems in the world, GP practices are free to operate as they choose to deliver the contracts they have agreed.  While this autonomy carries its risks (the practice is the business, not simply a part of the business), it also creates huge freedom for practices to operate exactly as they want.

The pressures on practices mean that the sustainability of these independent, autonomous businesses is coming increasingly under threat.  Growth in funding does not keep pace with the growth in workload, and the staff required (especially GPs) in many areas simply cannot be found.

Here comes the challenge. In order to improve sustainability, practices have to find new ways of working.  These nearly always involve working with other practices.  These could be things such as creating a shared visiting team, building a staff bank, establishing a document management service, putting in place a prescribing hub, or any number of other things.  All of them will make a difference to practices, but all of them involve working with other practices.

If working together can make a difference to practice sustainability, particularly now when individual practice sustainability is under such pressure, why is that so few practices undertake these shared activities?

It is because working with other practices requires a ceding of some autonomy.  If five practices are working together to create a document management hub, they all have to agree to a single way of working for actioning and coding the incoming documents.  It doesn’t work if there are five different ways of doing things.  In order to gain the benefits of the shared hub, each practice has to give up its individual autonomy on how it does things and agree to the single collective way of doing things.

Instinctively GP partners and GP practices resist any attempt to curtail their autonomy.  It is in the DNA of GP practices to be extremely protective of their own autonomy.  This is why joint working is hard, however rational and straightforward it might seem on paper.

There are two critical components to enabling collaborative working in general practice.  The first is a shared belief that continuing on our own is unsustainable and that joint working will make a difference.  The second is that practices trust those whom they are ceding autonomy to, most commonly the other practices that they are working with.  If we do not trust them, and in particular those leading whatever the change is, we are unlikely to go ahead no matter how clear the potential benefits.

As an aside, this is why PCNs are difficult.  The starting point of PCNs was not a shared understanding that joint action is required, but rather a contractual requirement.  The initial level of trust between the practices thrown together in a PCN was usually low, unless there had been some history of effective joint working previously.  So PCNs started with a set of practices who were supposed to work together, but all of whom were hugely protective of their own individual practice autonomy.

As the sustainability crisis worsens, the need for joint working gets greater.  The challenge for GP practices is whether they are prepared to cede some autonomy now to enable this joint working to take place and be effective.  The risk is that refusing to give up some autonomy now will lead to a complete loss of autonomy in future when the practice reaches a crisis point from which it is not able to recover.