Transparency in Quality of Care: the NHS 10-Year Plan
One of the key themes of the recent NHS 10-year health plan for England “Fit for the Future” was of a new transparency of quality of care. This includes publishing easy-to-understand league tables that rank providers against key quality indicators. Allowing patients to search and choose providers based on quality data on the NHS App. This includes data on length of wait, patient ratings and clinical outcomes with the app also showing data on clinical teams and clinicians. Also using patient reported outcome measures and patient reported experience measures to help patients.
The Role of Data in Pure’s First Contact Physiotherapy (FCP) Service
Collecting these types of outcomes is a fundamental part of Pure’s First Contact Physiotherapy service for Primary Care. To that end we developed a unique data portal, the FCPPortal, that aims to solve and streamline data collection and reporting challenges for FCP services nationwide. In an environment where disparate data collection and management systems exist within a single GP Practice, we aim to combine these data streams and present actionable reports and recommendations without additional software costs or delivery mechanisms.
The Reach and Impact of the FCPPortal
Our FCPPortal is currently being used by over 240 PCN’s representing over 1,500 GP Practices that we support. This allows us to deliver consistent, reliable data, available to all partners which enables meaningful optimisation of the service at every stage of the patient journey. This was recently recognised nationally with becoming a finalist in the Data Integration Project of the Year category of the prestigious HSJ Partnership Awards 2025 as a joint entry between Pure and North West Leicestershire Primary Care Network and its use of the portal and its outcomes measures and data.
Features and Data Collection Capabilities of the FCPPortal
The Portal provides our FCP staff with an easy-to-use data collection tool, hosted on a secure web-based platform, its bespoke design ensures speed and clarity of data collection, which is then integrated for analysis via out data warehouse. It allows us to collect anonymous data of the following types:
- Condition and body part
- Patient demographics (geography, age, sex, etc)
- Appointment (face to face vs remote, unused appointments)
- Outcomes (follow up vs onward referral, percentage self-management, GP time saved)
- Patient feedback (aligned to Roadmap to Practice Person Satisfaction Questionnaire (PSQ))
- Utilisation (referral source/initial point of contact, DnA rates, request rate, waiting time, etc)
Each data point has a KPI and benchmarks in line with the NHSE Roadmap Governance, Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS), and ongoing performance review. Colour-coded dashboards for month-on-month KPI tracking versus the NHSE benchmarks allow for quick alerting to benchmark concerns.
Patient Feedback and Reporting
The NHSE roadmap to practice stipulates a specific feedback form with a requirement of 40 patient feedback examples per year per FCP. Pure aims to exceed this with staff encouraged to submit patient feedback daily, resulting in thousands of bits of feedback every month. Each month, an automated report is delivered by email to all partners involved in the delivery of the FCP service, with only the relevant data shared with each stakeholder. For example, a PCN manager will receive a report of all GP Practices within their remit, vs GP manager reports which only include pertinent information about their practice. Reports include optimisation recommendations alongside the easy-to-analyse graphs which provide a holistic review of performance and value.
Reducing Burdens on GP Practices and PCNs
Our specialist practitioners help reduce the burdens of long waiting lists, limited resources, and administrative constrains on GP Practices – leading to further relief for PCNs and their Integrated Care Boards (ICBs). By deploying the FCPPortal alongside our FCP services, we can accurately determine how to deploy the additional resources to maximise cost and time efficiency to better care for the patients attending an FCP appointment. The patient journey is also positively affected, with more availability for administration staff to manage clinician diaries, streamlined processes for referrals, and great understanding of patient experience from first point of contact to secondary care.
Reducing Burdens on GP Practices and PCNs
As well as demonstrating our value to the patient pathway and during the patient contact, we have also completed a large sample retrospective audit on patient outcomes, 12 weeks following their FCP appointment. We wanted to analyse how many patients reattended their GP or other healthcare professionals during this time. The study showed that 78% of patients did not need to seek a further appointment following their FCP intervention. You can read more about this and our national retrospective service evaluation here: https://pureunityhealth.co.uk/resources/blog/primary-care-reattendance/
Looking Ahead: The Growing Importance of Data in Healthcare
The 10-Year Health Plan clearly shows that data collection including on patient and clinical outcomes will become even more critical over the coming years. Our existing award winning FCPPortal already delivers key information in an easy to use and shareable format. We do this to give our PCN partners more time, allowing them to run their practices, not collate data safe in the knowledge that they have what they need, when they need it.
