GP Profiles

The national recognition that early diagnosis is critical to improving cancer outcomes in England, coupled with the current restructuring of commissioning organisations have prevented both challenges and opportunities to the NHS. 

By refocusing the information that we have available so that it reflects practice within smaller geographical areas – such as register GP populations, we are able to identify areas for improvement which do not require us to deliver region-wide interventions. This presents a unique opportunity for us in terms of more targeted improvement work that is specific to the needs of smaller communities.

At the same time, this requires us to reconfigure the way in which analysis is produced.

In order to meet these new objectives, the National Cancer Intelligence Network in collaboration with the Association of Public Health Organisations and the National Cancer Action Team, developed the GP Practice Profiles for Cancer

GP Practice Profiles bring together a range of outcomes and process information relevant to cancer in primary care. They provide comparative information for benchmarking and reviewing variations at a General Practice level. This initiative supports the National Awareness and Early Diagnosis Initiative to improve early diagnosis of cancer and outcomes for cancer patients.

Cancer Network Progress

The availability of the GP profiles presented us with an excellent opportunity to engage with GPs and to promote the NAEDI agenda within Primary Care.

The GP profiles have now been distributed to all GPs within Lancashire and South Cumbria along with supporting information helping GPs to interpret the information they contain.  We have also taken steps to ensure that we are available as the first point of contact for GPs when they want to discuss the early diagnosis of cancer and potential interventions to improve this within their populations.

Alongside the distribution of the Profiles, we promoted the Cancer Commissioning Toolkit, a national web based tool covering a wide range of cancer statistics.  Access for this tool required a non-disclosure agreement to be signed by the senior partner of the organisation.  We have been extremely happy with the uptake of this resource, with more GPs signing up to access the toolkit than in any other Cancer Network in England.

The emerging GP Consortia were also potential recipients of this information and so the data used to generate the GP Profiles was compiled into a single database, allowing us to generate statistical analysis based on various sub-PCT geographies.