You may have heard, earlier this year, The Health Foundation launched a new funding programme to explore the potential for general practice to increase continuity of care for their patients. Through this programme, we hope to surface learning on the effectiveness of different structural solutions, enabling technologies and cultural conditions required to increase continuity of care in primary care.

This programme was developed following the publication of research by our Data Analytics team at the Health Foundation in January 2017 demonstrating the positive impact of continuity of care.

We have awarded five teams from around the UK with up to £250,000 of funding to test interventions and approaches to increase continuity with their practice(s) or federations. Their projects will run from now until January 2021. Alongside this, we have commissioned quantitative and mixed methods evaluations to assess the impact of the programme. The programme was developed with support from the Royal College of General Practitioners who we have now commissioned to provide ongoing support to teams and lead on learning and dissemination.

We are now in the process of developing an advisory group for the programme and its evaluations – the role of the advisory group is to be a critical friend to this work. We hope the group will provide strategic direction, as well as constructive challenge and rigour, to all elements of the design and delivery of the programme and its evaluation, ensuring it meets its aims and objectives.

We are looking for a patient representative to join this group as we think the role the patient voice can play in this programme is invaluable. One of our primary aims is to demonstrate the positive impact increased continuity of care in general practice can have on patients therefore capturing patient viewpoints is key to delivering a maximally effective and beneficial programme.

We are therefore inviting Q members to nominate themselves to be a part of the advisory group. We are looking for someone who is interested in improvement work, has experienced good or bad continuity of care in general practice and is willing to bring their perspectives to the debate.

Full information about the time commitment, our compensation approach and the role of the advisory group are available within the terms of reference.

If this is something that interests you, please email me (hannah.patel@health.org.uk) to learn more about this opportunity and nominate yourself for this role.