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Primary care trusts: the way forward?

Keele University and Central Cheshire Primary Care Trust, The Barony, Barony Road, Nantwich, Cheshire CW5 5QU, UK

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Professor Ong;
Pauline.Ong@ccpct.nhs.uk

Keywords: primary care trust; public health; community participation; clinicians’ involvement

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

The All Party Parliamentary Group on Primary Care and Public Health states that "being charged with the strategic responsibility to improve the health of their populations is one of the greatest opportunities facing PCTs [primary care trusts], and a perspective that is a relatively new phenomenon in primary care".¹ This emergence of the PCTs as health improvement organisations has a major impact on its other two core functions, namely the development of primary care and the commissioning of services—or rather described as the shaping of services jointly with other agencies in response to patient need. While primary care development and the design of services are crucial roles for the PCT, the most important conceptual shift is arguably the change to ensuring that the public health agenda sets the direction for the PCT and its partners.

The "new public health" stresses that common measures to protect the health . . . [Full text of this article]