Last Thursday, the Care Group held its Annual General Meeting at the Education Centre, Mile End Hospital.
Care Group and Primary Care staff and other stakeholders were invited along to reflect on our journey over the past 10 years together and discuss the future.
Zainab Arian, our CEO, reminded us of the founding principles of our organisation: “You wanted us to be the voice of primary care, to be able to deliver services across the borough at scale, provide system resilience and deliver on social value. All these principles remain in everything that we do today.”
We highlighted the struggle in articulating the multi-faceted role of the Care Group over the years as a federation providing representative support to practices at the ICB level, as a preferred provider in delivering services and as an anchor organisation providing key social value to our borough(s) and communities by recruiting from local population, procuring from local businesses, promoting environmental activities across care group and primary care. Further details can be found in our annual report which was shared during the meeting.
Looking to the future, we’re working towards the following achievements:
Federated support – enhance our engagement with practices, working collaboratively to build a sustainable model for primary care focusing on practice support and using our primary care voice at local and system levels.
Preferred provider – expand our offer around primary and community services across our locations, and the wider system and we’re open to expanding outside of North East London. We will do this in collaboration with our commissioners and our patients to deliver the best services possible.
Anchor organisation– increase ethical and environmental activities, develop the skills of our local population starting with our workforce, and working with our schools and community groups to recruit from our local areas. We will explore increasing our social investment including charitable donations.
Lastly, we want to be at the forefront of developments in technology and artificial intelligence for Primary Care and roll out our corporate support offer to health and educational services, practices and beyond.
Thank you to all colleagues that attended to share food, ideas, suggestions and highlights together on the day, and all those that have been with us on this journey as we move forward. We are confident in achieving these goals while we have the support of practices and networks behind us.
