Using the GP team and wider partners
The entire GP team can play a significant role in ill-health prevention and
public health, while at the same time improving continuity of care and
reducing the workload for GPs. Practice nurses and additional practice staff
are essential in developing an effective and cost-effective, practice-wide,
ill-health prevention approach. Practice-based approaches to public health
include running prevention groups or providing community-based services
within the practice. The use of group meetings or health promotion clinics has
been a longstanding activity in general practice. Advice workers in general
practice have also benefited families with young children, for maternal and
child health (Peckham and Exworthy 2003).
Another example of how GPs can help to improve their patients’ health
without substantially increasing their workload is by working with external
community partners. One example is the Liverpool Healthy Homes (LHH)
initiative, which seeks to prevent death and illness due to poor housing
conditions and accidents in the home (see www.liverpool.gov.uk/Environment/
Environmental_health/healthyhomes/index.asp). The programme works with
a range of stakeholders, with GPs as key partners. With their patients’ consent,
GPs inform the LHH when a patient’s health is affected by their housing
situation. The LHH initiative focuses on the individual patient, but works with
numerous partners to address community health.
The LHH is an example of community-orientated primary care (COPC),
described as ‘the continual process by which primary health care teams
provide care to a defined community on the basis of its assessed health
needs by the planned integration of public health with (primary care)
practice’ (Gillam et al 1998). This approach involves the entire primary
care team in identifying and prioritising, then assessing and addressing,
local health problems. Other COPC achievements include innovative service
developments such as a one-stop-shop service for nursing, physiotherapy,
chiropody and benefits advice for people over 75 years old, and a benefits
outreach service for people over the age of 80 in two London practices (Iliffe
and Lenihan 2001).
These types of population-based interventions raise the issue of how to identify
and measure effectiveness – especially of individual stakeholders. However, as
the NICE public health guidance demonstrates, methods are improving.
Having considered the policy background, we now go on to consider case
studies in the following four areas: for primary prevention, childhood
immunisation; for secondary prevention, smoking cessation and screening
for cardiovascular disease; and finally, as an area that cuts across primary,
secondary and tertiary prevention, obesity.