The Department is encouraging general practitioners (GPs) to work more closely with voluntary organisations to provide patients with peer support and information. The main way of delivering this is through support to GP practices as commissioners.
World class commissioning (WCC) is designed to encourage primary care trusts (PCTs) to make decisions based on detailed, local needs assessments, using the views of front line primary care clinicians and with close collaboration with patients, the public, community partners and a range of service providers. Practice based commissioning is at the core of WCC and is the main medium for practices to feed in their views and ideas on how to improve services for their patients into PCTs commissioning strategies. This allows practices, using the needs assessment produced by the PCT and the local authority, to address the specific needs of their patients using a wide range of service providers, including voluntary organisations.
The Department has also commissioned a number of primary care service frameworks to support PCTs in commissioning primary medical care services. For example the long term conditions framework includes a requirement for the provider to demonstrate multi-professional and integrated teams working across the whole care pathway, including voluntary and community organisations.