Primary Care Network Estates toolkit

Community Health Partnerships worked with the National Association of Primary Care (NAPC) on behalf of NHS England, to produce a Primary Care Network (PCN) Estates Toolkit to provide PCNs with a flexible framework and support process for producing robust primary care investment plans with clear priorities that align to wider ICS strategies.

The toolkit was launched in November 2021 has been developed from the published guidance; Primary Care Networks: Critical thinking in developing an estate strategy (PDF) into practical tools for use and application. It is a practical ‘how to’ guide to help primary care networks (PCNs) start work on developing their premises so they’re able to provide integrated, community-based health and care well into the future. Its purpose is to support PCNs in delivering expanded services and new ways of integrated working to realise the ambitions of the NHS Long Term Plan.

The toolkit has two objectives:

• To enable each PCN to identify and prioritise their estate optimisation, disinvestment, and subsequent capital investment requirements to address population health priorities and future service needs.
• To support the production of capital investment plans for PCNs and places and help ICSs to aggregate and prioritise local primary care investment requirements against other system demands for capital.

The toolkit utilises data and analysis already gathered via the primary care data gathering programme (PCDG) and live local datasets held on the SHAPE PCDG Atlas.

Each PCN will be able to request a pre-populated version of the templates with their local SHAPE data embedded, to provide a good starting point.

The toolkit contains a powerpoint template which contains all the sheets to populate and links to external excel templates (that can be pre-populated at PCN level based on the data available) and then developed and updated. Each section has a supporting guidance document to help understand what to think about and how to populate. It also suggests running some workshops and gives you the topics to be covered etc. The outcome at the end of the process is a robust, evidence based PCN service and estate investment plan, supported by a population health led clinical vision and based on current PCN estates information.

The toolkit helps each PCN to fully assess its existing estate against its local clinical vision, service strategy and forecasted demand. It is envisaged that every building will be able to be placed into one of the following three categories:

• CORE – Buildings that will remain in operation delivering primary care services for at least the next 10 years
• FLEX – Buildings that will be providing primary care services for at least the next five years but may not be needed longer-term as the clinical model evolves
• TAIL – Buildings that are likely to be disposed of within the next five years.