What is a federation?

Federations are organisations to support “primary care at scale”; to try and remodel the hospital / community interface; and to integrate with other health and social care functions. The Federation presence as integrators of care in the community accords fully with the direction of travel of the 5-Year NHS Forward View.

Federations were first discussed within the RCGPs in 2007 in “the RCGP road Map” and development has been under way since, some of the federations are well established and others are just starting up but all have broadly similar aims. The focus of the RCGP roadmap was to encourage GP practices to work together and share expertise and be able to deliver services at a wider scale than just their own patient groups.

Federations have been forming across the country in response to the roadmap, it is difficult to know how many federations now exist but they can vary in size from 98,000 patients to 10,000.

Stort Valley Health was formed in response to this direction of travel.

Stort Valley Health covers 66,000 patients across the Stort Valley and Villages

The specific aims of the federation are to:

• To strengthen the capacity of practices to develop new services out of hospital
• To form a an entity that can tender for services and provide completion for private sector providers
• To improve local service provision and integration
• To develop training/ research and education across the Stort Valley and Villages
• Stort Valley Health is a provider organisation which means it can deliver services in the local area much as a private company could, it is run on a commercial basis but with a public sector ethos.

The Vision

The vision of SVH is to increase provision of primary care services in the Local area, to improve the patient journey from increasing access to clinicians to providing more community services in the Stort Valley

Our Role

Our role in this is to develop ideas with the local practices, health care providers and managers to facilitate local transformation

Our Values

We have worked hard to develop an organisation that can respond to local needs and provide an opportunity for local GPs to develop out of Hospital services that suit our patient group

Innovation

We are working on a number of projects at the moment to provide more provision on a regular basis to our patients both young and old.

Stort Valley Health is a LLP limited by shares

Practices have contributed £1/per patient from the direct Enhanced services payment to provide capital to establish the federation. Member practices hold shares depending on the size of the population but each has equal representation and voting rights on the board of directors.