Who are we?

The National Primary Care Development Team is a small national team based in Manchester with an infrastructure of 11 NPDT centres across England dedicated to improving public services. The team works primarily in the NHS, but an increasing volume of the NPDT's work involves multi-agency, multi-disciplinary groups looking at topics that are trans-societal.

Since its establishment in 2000, the NPDT has:

.  Developed an internationally acclaimed improvement team
.  Established a nationwide resource for improvement
.  Developed a cohort of people who understand continuous improvement and how to use it to effect change in public service
.  Kick-started a continuous quality improvement movement in primary care
.  Delivered impressive results from a range of improvement programmes
.  Developed a number of 'public health practitioners' in deprived communities
.  Demonstrated the impact of engaging community teams in improvement.

The NPDT is primarily commissioned by the Department of Health, but our work also extends to the Department for Education and Skills and a number of other UK and overseas-based organisations.

What do we do?
The NPDT runs improvement programmes that engage people in change that is relevant to their every day lives and designed to enable them to make rapid, measurable, systematic and sustainable improvement. The NPDT helps individuals to develop practical, transferable skills in quality improvement that can be applied to any priority to develop a culture of continuous improvement.

The NPDT focuses on public service improvement that:

.  Delivers results
.  Maximises spread
.  Engages and enthuses frontline staff
.  Results in large system change
.  Transfers skills in quality improvement.
These improvement programmes use a 'collaborative' approach based on the Institute of Health Care Improvement's Breakthrough series.

Following the success of the NPDT's programmes within England, and subsequently Scotland, there has been considerable interest in the NPDT's skills from overseas including interest from Sweden, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Singapore, Canada and Australia. The NPDT is supporting the delivery of a National Primary Care Collaborative in Australia over the next three years.

The NPDT focuses on maximising the transfer of skills and resources to frontline personnel to deliver sustainable change and improvement. In 2002, 11 NPDT centres were established to run local improvement programmes. These centres are part of the NPDT's infrastructure for delivery and are key to a sustainable spread of improvement.

The NPDT's first programme, the National Primary Care Collaborative, now covers over 5,000 practices and 32.6 million patients. It has produced rapid results, including dramatic reductions in waiting times and improvements in patient care. It is currently the world's largest health improvement programme.

"The NPDT may have achieved the largest deployed systematic improvement in modern history - not just in health care but in history." - Donald M Berwick, Institute for Healthcare Improvement

In the area of chronic disease management, the NPDT's results indicate that if their work was replicated across England over a 10-year period there would be:

.  35,100 fewer diabetic patients with complications of their disease
.  28,500 fewer diabetic patients suffering strokes or heart attacks
.  11,600 fewer deaths of diabetic patients.

For further information please contact the NPDT on 0161 236 1566, or e-mail national.team@npdt.nhs.uk.

Sir John Oldham Head of the National Primary Care Development Team