Thomas Beaney, Gabriele Kerr, Benedict Hayhoe, Azeem Majeed, Jonathan Clarke
Department of Primary Care and Public Health, Imperial College London Centre for Mathematics of Precision Healthcare, National Institute for Health Research Applied Research Collaboration Northwest London
The Wellcome Trust, National Institute for Health Research
Primary Care Networks (PCNs) are expected to be a building block for Integrated Care Systems but little is known about how they represent local communities.
We wanted to identify the "catchment areas" for PCNs in England using publicly available data about where people live and which GP practice they are registered to. We then also examined the extent to which the registered and resident populations of PCNs overlapped with eachother.
This was an observational study using publicly available data on the number of people within each Lower Layer Super Output Area (LSOA) registered to each General Practice (GP) in England in April 2021. LSOAs were assigned to the PCN to which the majority of residents were registered. The PCN catchment population was defined as the total number of people resident in all LSOAs assigned to that PCN. We compared PCN catchment populations to the population of people registered to a GP practice in each PCN.
In April 2021, 6,506 GP practices were part of 1,251 PCNs. 56.1% of PCNs had between 30,000 and 50,000 registered patients. There was a strong correlation (0.91) between the total registered population size and catchment population size. We found significant variation in the percentage of residents in each LSOA registered to a GP practice within the same PCN catchment, and strong associations with both urban-rural status and socioeconomic deprivation.
Interactive maps showing the boundaries of PCN catchment areas and the proportion of PCN registered population who are resident in the catchment of the PCN for each NHS England region can be found below:
Our study defines PCN catchment areas and identifies significant variation in the overlap between PCN registered patient populations and PCN catchment populations across the country. It is not yet clear the extent to which this may cause problems for the integration of primary care with other health services, but further work is required to understand this important issue in more detail.
This work has been written as an academic paper and is currently undergoing peer-review.