As a reminder a First Contact Practitioner (FCP) is a healthcare professional working at an advanced clinical level with in-depth knowledge and experience of musculoskeletal (MSK) problems, who can provide clinical assessment, diagnosis, and a personalised management plan for patients with joint, muscular or nerve symptoms

Click here to read more about this service and how it can help the patient.

Benefits of FCPs to Primary Care Services

The FCP service:

• Offers additional patient capacity within the Primary care Network (PCN) by managing the MSK caseload, which composes approximately 20% GP appointments. This helps to ease pressure and stress on GPs who can then concentrate on patients with medical conditions
• Improves the quality of the MSK service offered at local surgery level.
• Enhances communication between MSK and the primary care team by working as part of the multi-disciplinary team (MDT) at PCN level.
• Offers more agile and effective clinical pathways, by having knowledge of the local pathways and services available. Streamlines MSK pathways, through direct access to specialist MSK clinicians, improving patient experience and outcomes. This maximises service efficiency and avoids duplication.
• Fewer prescriptions required by patients, reducing prescription costs to the PCN and reducing avoidable adverse drug reactions in patients.
• Reduce X-rays, MRIs, and referrals to hospitals (3-5% cost reduction).
• Excellent patient experience with more than 90% of patients reporting good or very good satisfaction with the service.

Areas with FCP support:

We are the largest provider of FCPs in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough, supporting 50 GP practices in 13 Primary Care Networks