Continuity of care in general practice multi-disciplinary teams: Understanding the impact of pharmacy roles and measuring continuity across the wider team
Background
Continuity of care, where patients see the same clinician or team over time, is known to improve health outcomes and make both patients and clinicians more satisfied with care. Patients value having someone who knows their history, offers consistent advice, and builds a trusted relationship. However, this kind of care is changnig in general practice, partly because more healthcare professionals like pharmacists, nurses, and social prescribers are now working alongside GPs in multidisciplinary teams (MDTs). While this team-based model can offer many benefits, it might also change how continuity of care is delivered and understood.
Traditionally, continuity of care meant regularly seeing the same GP. But now, care is more often shared across a team. For example, a patient might see a GP for a long-term condition, a pharmacist for medication reviews, and others for additional support. This new way of working means we need new ways to define and measure continuity, which means going beyond just the GP-patient relationship. Current tools don’t fully capture this team-based continuity, and we don’t yet know how these changes affect patient experience. Pharm-CONNECT will explore how the growing number of roles in general practice, particularly clinical pharmacists, affect continuity of care, and how we might better measure and improve it in today’s NHS.
What we aim to do
This study aims to explore how the growing number of healthcare professionals working in general practice teams, like pharmacists and pharmacy technicians, affects how care is coordinated and experienced by both professionals and patients. Traditionally, continuity of care meant seeing the same GP regularly, but with more professionals now involved in care, this idea is changing.
Using pharmacy staff as an example, the study will look at:
- How healthcare professionals experience working together to provide coordinated care.
- How patients feel about continuity when they are cared for by a team instead of just one GP.
- What impact team-based working has on the personal, long-term relationships patients may have with their GP.
- How to better measure continuity of care in practices where care is shared across a team.
The study will result in a new understanding of what continuity means in today’s general practice, and provide practical recommendations on how to measure it in team-based settings.
Funding
This study has been funded through the NIHR School for Primary Care Research
