Congratulations to Dr Clarke and Prof Barahona on their most recent publication

New research has shown how GP practices can be combined into naturally-occurring communities.

Primary Care Networks (PCNs) are a new organisational hierarchy with wide-ranging responsibilities introduced in the National Health Service (NHS) Long Term Plan. The vision is that PCNs should represent ‘natural’ communities of general practices (GP practices) collaborating at scale and covering a geography that fits well with practices, other healthcare providers and local communities. Our study aims to identify natural communities of GP practices based on patient registration patterns using Markov Multiscale Community Detection, an unsupervised network-based clustering technique to create catchments for these communities.

To read the paper in full go to: https://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/10/7/e036504