Brighton Integrated Care Service

This section is provided for health professionals (GPs, dentists, pharmacists etc).

Members of the general public are welcome to use these pages but should be aware that they are not written with them in mind. Please choose an option on the left for information aimed at the general public.

GP practices across the city are starting to work together to:

reduce workload for practices by creating one place to send all referrals;
set up a team of specially trained and experienced local GPs to triage referrals to ensure that all patients get to see the right professional, in the right place at the right time;
improve the quality of elective outpatient services;
make sure that practices have the information they need to develop innovative services through practice based commissioning

The working name for this project at the moment is Brighton Integrated Care Service or BICS, and it has now been given the go ahead by all three PBC locality groups.

BICS is a collaborative venture involving Brighton and Hove GPs and has two principle functions:

the delivery of gateway management
the development of primary care based alternatives to traditional hospital outpatients

Gateway management means that all referrals for elective care go through one point. As described above this has the potential to reduce workload for practices, as well as ensuring that all patients are referred to the best available service and give practice based commissioners the information they need to develop new services.

A collaborative primary care organisation also has the potential to deliver a range of other functions, in the best mutual interest of patients, primary and secondary care alike. These include:

providing primary care based patient services such as diabetes intermediate care, musculo-skeletal assessment and treatment and GPwSI type clinics (eg ENT and ophthalmology)
providing ‘holding’ solutions for 18 week referral to treatment pathways, which reduce the burden on practice teams, so that patients do not have to be referred by practices back into hospital if their treatment has to be delayed.
offering Choose and Book to patients away from the GP consultation, reducing GP and practice work load.

This project is supported by practice based commissioners in Brighton and Hove and a Steering Group (24kb Word file) has been established which anyone is welcome to join. The project is being managed by a Project Team, made up of Peter Devlin, Jonathan Serjeant, Emma Stanley, Zoë Nicholson, Samantha Horwill and Liv Singh.

The team are creating a business case to be agreed by all localities at the end of January and their aspiration is to have this new referral management service run by local GPs operational by the 1st April 2008.

Please discuss this idea in your practices, fill in the questionnaire (38kb Word file) and return to the team by the end of December 2008. You may be contacted by a member of the Project Team in the meantime to discuss any questions you may have.

If you would like any further information, or you would like someone from the Project Team or Steering Group to visit you at your practice to discuss further, then please contact Liv Singh.