The Whitehouse Centre GP practice was established in 2001 as the result of a pilot to provide services for people who have difficulty accessing mainstream health services. The service has evolved over several years and now provides primary medical care services to patients living in the Greater Huddersfield area from the following backgrounds:

— Homeless or in emergency accommodation,

— Asylum seekers,

— Sex workers.

The main focus of the GP practice is to provide care to people that often have a complexity of needs due to circumstances outside their control. This can be a sensitive and high profile service area.

Aims and objectives of service.

— to provide safe, high quality, effective GP led primary medical care and health promotion, tailored to the unique needs of specific populations living in the Greater Huddersfield area who are registered with the practice,

— to provide an accessible town centre based service to meet the needs and requirements of those specific patient groups,

— to offer all patients registering with the practice a face to face new patient check which includes managing expectations of how long they may be registered with the practice,

— to provide support to patients to enable a large proportion to transfer to a mainstream provider of primary medical services within a 12 month period,

— to coordinate patient transition to a mainstream GP practice. This could be through partnership working with voluntary organisations, third party organisations or other external agencies,

— to provide information and support to mainstream GP practices about services that are available to support patients who register with them following a period of registration with the Whitehouse Centre,

— to offer flexibility where necessary ensuring patients who would not attend pre-arranged appointments are able to ‘drop in’,

— to offer flexibility in terms of appointment and opening times to meet the needs of registered patients – for example evening appointments,

— to work in partnership with local statutory and voluntary organisations and other appropriate agencies to address wider patient needs,

— to strive continuously through innovation and engagement to improve Patient experience and outcomes for primary medical care patients, their carers and families,

— to meet the requirements of the access standards (Appendix A),

— to be aware of national targets for vaccine targets and to work towards consistently achieving them.