Is general practice easy to do business with? The prevailing wisdom of the day is no, general practice is not easy to do business with. One of the big gaps identified in the Five Year Forward View was the one that exists between general practice and, well, everyone else. In a world of integrated care systems the NHS needs general practice to be easy to do business with. It needs general practice to be an active partner in the new arrangements because it recognises integrated care won’t succeed without it.

Being easy to do business with benefits practices as well as the system. It means more resources can be directed into primary care, aligned to the impact this investment will have on the system as a whole. It means general practice not only has a voice, but can shape changes to the system in a way that makes sense for its patients. It means the problems of distance from the community providers and the hospitals can be tackled not via fruitless arguments in a contracting room, but in practical changes that impact how services operate.

Why is general practice not easy to do business with? It is essentially a numbers game. The average hospital serves a population of about 300,000. The average practice serves a population of 8,000. So that is an average of 37.5 practices for each hospital to be doing busy with. It is an unsustainable number of relationships for a hospital to maintain. Community trusts serve population sizes of over a million, exacerbating the problem even further.

Enter general practice at-scale. Much of the drive for general practice at-scale is to solve this numbers problem. If general practice is organised into units of 30-50,000 there are only 6-10 relationships needed for an acute trust to be able to partner with general practice. If it is organised into larger federations of 200-300,000, then this number may be reduced to 1 or 2.

But there is a danger of being too greedy. The greater the distance of the general practice organisation from its practices (i.e. the bigger it is), the harder it is for it to really represent the views of its member practices. And of course with integrated care it is not just about presenting views, it is about changing models of care. If the system pulls the (newly created) general practice lever (in the form of the federation) but nothing happens, all we have really done is add to the complexity by increasing the number of organisations.

Hence the value of at-scale general practice lies in the strength of its relationships with its member practices. I write a lot about the importance of trust between practices and their network/federation leaders, but it is because it is so crucial. If these leaders sit around the integrated care table and cannot commit their practices to anything, and spend their time explaining how complex the general practice landscape is because practices are independent contractors, then the gap between general practice and the rest of the system has not really been closed.

But if these leaders can sit around the integrated care table and make decisions on behalf of their practices, firm in the knowledge that whatever direction they choose the member practices will follow on the basis of their belief and trust in them, it means general practice is, at last, easy to do business with.