• Advanced search

Healthcare services where you live

Enhancing care in our communities

 

Around 90 per cent of the contact patients have with the NHS every day is with primary care, not hospitals. In North Wales, we have:

• 121 GP (family doctor) practices
• 102 dental practices
• 153 pharmacies
• 90 optometrists’ practices (eye care)

These provide services for people of all ages. They all play an important role in supporting patients and carers stay well and making sure hospital care can be reached when needed.

They work closely with each other as well as with social services and the voluntary sector to improve and bring together services in local communities.  In each local area we have appointed a leader for this work (usually a local GP) who is helping to redesign and improve services.Over recent years there has been more importance placed on providing safe, high quality services as locally as possible, closer to people’s homes. We have identifed our initial priorities in discussion with representatives of local communities.

Our priorities for action

Targeted prevention

Enhanced care at home

Moving care from hospitals to the community

Targeted prevention

We know that there are a number of factors that have an effect on health, and we want to promote good health as well as treating ill health.

• GPs and community pharmacists will advise and offer support to people, concentrating on priority areas such as smoking, diet, exercise, alcohol consumption and immunisation
•     We will extend health visitors’ work with young children and their families
•     We will support work to reduce the number of falls older people have
•     We will promote patient education programmes which help people with long-term illnesses learn about their condition and live in a way that helps manage this
•     We will use more technology to help people identify problems early on and reduce the distance people have to travel
•     We will work closely with social services to identify and support carers

Enhanced Care at Home

In 2010 we developed a new service in north Denbighshire to provide more care for people in their own homes who might otherwise need to go into hospital.  This is now being extended into other areas.

The patient’s GP practice decides with the patient and their family whether they can be safely cared for at home with extra help from nurses, therapists, social workers and voluntary organisations.  This care is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

This includes improving care for patients at the end of their life, bringing together primary care (GPs), community services, hospices and specialist end-of-life teams to support people to die at home.  This work has already started.

The Community Health Council undertook a survey of people using this service and also their carers.  Just over a third of patients and half of carers returned the survey and the feedback was very positive, with a few suggestions for improvement which are being addressed.

Moving care from hospitals to the community