The role and function of Primary Care Teams in Ireland
What is a Primary Care Team?
Primary Care Teams (PCT) are teams of healthcare professionals who work closely together in the community to treat patients away from a hospital setting. A PCT consists of all or a selection of the following :
• GP and Nurse
• Physiotherapist
• Public Health Nurse
• Occupational Therapist
• Psychologist
• Dentist
• Social Workers
• Home Care Specialists
• Dieticians
• Speech and Language Therapists
• Ophthalmologists and ENT Specialist
Other more alternative services such as a podiatrist, a chiropodist, Acupuncturists etc may also be present.
The PCT most often consists of a GP, a Nurse and a Physiotherapist while many of the other professions split their time between two or more teams. This is be very common with Occupational Therapists in particular.
Primary Care Teams should ideally be housed within the same complex where they could easily refer to and consult on different cases, this however appears to be more difficult than first imagined as many Physiotherapists who work in the community find themselves working alone and sometimes without an office/base for their practice.
The HSE, which is the driving force behind this initiative hopes that PCTs will ultimately care for the rehabilitation of patients within the community following a hospital visit saving them from returning to hospital on a regular basis for after-care. The HSE currently has 222 active PCT around the country, though it is hard to know which of these are working at maximum efficiency as it appears that some do not have a base/centre to work out of. There are plans to have 530 teams formed by 2011.
Having spoken to a number of Physiotherapists who work in a Primary setting I feel that PCTs could potentially be very beneficial. A problem with the system as it is now is that there is very little consistency. In a PCT all professionals have access to the patient’s history and could potentially make a more accurate, team-based diagnosis and management plan.
For a PCT to function at this ideal capacity it must be laid out correctly in one centre or complex where there are one set of patient notes. Currently there appear to be many PCTs which do not have this facility and therefore are forced to function as individual GPs and Physiotherapists working alone in a primary setting. Though they might refer to each other they do not function as a single team.
