ABSTRACT
General practitioners (GP) are primarily providers of health care for their patients. This chapter describes the origins and development of the Quinton Centre in Birmingham. It focuses on resourcing general practice to enable more or better services to be offered to patients in a primary care setting. The aim is to get a better fit between patients' needs and the skills and resources available in different settings. Two main themes emerged from the primary health care strategy – more effective use of resources and the shift of clinical services from secondary to primary settings. In the early stages of planning for what became the Quinton Primary Care Resource Centre, the project group considered a number of examples of the kinds of services that might be provided from a new 'local care facility'. The London Road Health Co-operative is essentially a voluntary collaboration between community health services and a small cluster of GP practices.
