Identifying naturally occurring communities of primary care providers in the English National Health Service in London.

ABSTRACT:

Objectives

Primary Care Networks (PCNs) are a new organisational hierarchy with wide-ranging responsibilities introduced in the National Health Service (NHS) Long Term Plan. The vision is that PCNs should represent 'natural' communities of general practices (GP practices) collaborating at scale and covering a geography that fits well with practices, other healthcare providers and local communities. Our study aims to identify natural communities of GP practices based on patient registration patterns using Markov Multiscale Community Detection, an unsupervised network-based clustering technique to create catchments for these communities.

Design

Retrospective observational study using Hospital Episode Statistics - patient-level administrative records of attendances to hospital.

SUBMITTER: Clarke J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7375630 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature