Welcome to Macclesfield Primary Care Network
As the town’s six GP practices, we’re often the first point of contact for NHS care to over 60,000 local people.
With demand for health and care services increasing as we get older, GP practices across the country are working together to provide their local communities with a resilient and high quality healthcare service. Facilitating this joint working in our community is the Macclesfield Primary Care Network.
Our Network brings together the practices of Waters Green Medical Centre to develop high quality healthcare services for all our patients in a convenient and reliable setting.
Your GP practice will still be operating independently, but by working alongside the other practices, we will be able to provide an easy-to-access, efficient healthcare service for the residents of Macclesfield, now and in the future.
What is a Primary Care Network?
Primary Care Networks are the new way for local health services to work together; by building upon existing primary care services, this enables a greater provision of proactive, personalised and more integrated health and social care. 99% of GP practices are now working in partnership as part of local Primary Care Networks.
Watch a short animation from NHS England explaining how they work here.
What is Macclesfield Primary Care Network working on?
It’s early days but we’re already well ahead and starting to agree on new approaches and services based on what local people need. Longer term, this will help us work together to recruit more staff such as physician’s associates, clinical pharmacists and social prescribing link workers so that we can offer a broader range of services to patients across our practices.
So what might this look like for patients in the future?
- Some longer GP consultations – up to 20 minutes – if your GP thinks you need one.
- Same-day emergency appointments or phone consultations when you need them, not next week.
- Access to other healthcare professionals such as physios and pharmacists who can see and help you quicker when you are unwell.
- Different types of appointments – telephone, online and digital consultations where a tap and a click could save you a trip.
- A wealth of online health advice and apps that you can trust to manage your own health 24/7.
- A range of easy ways to get involved in your own care and have a greater say in local health services and how these are delivered.
Meet the Team
Primary Care Networks in Action
“The Macclesfield Primary Care Network will help bring General Practice into the modern era. As individual practices it has become increasingly challenging to meet the ever changing demand of the health and social care system. By working together as six practices we can look to create additional services for our patients, employ different members of staff and use technology to improve patient care.”
Dr Joe Banns
“The Asthma Diagnostic Hub is run by staff across the practices at Waters Green, who have experience and qualifications in Asthma Care.
We care about Asthma and know that getting the correct diagnosis is so important. We want the diagnostic pathway to be streamlined in General Practice.”
Marie Evans
“To look after patients we first have to look after ourselves. I hope that step by step we can start to make positive changes to promote wellbeing within the PCN. And through the use of the new dedicated staff portal on the website, we can improve communication with staff, build a valuable resource that is actually helpful and develop more initiatives to improve health and wellbeing throughout Waters Green.
One such initiative is to learn from and celebrate staff at times when performance has been exemplary.”
Dr Claire Hirons
“Although the primary care network is a new venture for NHS England, the 6 practices in Macclesfield have been working together for many years, even before moving into Waters Green in July 2006. All our efforts so far have been dependent on goodwill, looking at what the practices have to do and where we can, just do it once instead of 6 times.
The advent of the PCN has brought us funding for leadership and development and we look forward now to developing new and improved patient services across Waters Green.”
Chris Campbell-Kelly
“It was good to be greeted in such a friendly manner and I am sure that no one felt “talked down to” as can so often happen on these occasions.
I thoroughly enjoyed the afternoon and found it useful. I have already made use of the information by booking myself in at Shopmobility for an electric scooter and possibly acting as a volunteer in a non-walking situation!”