GIRFT’s musculoskeletal (MSK) community delivery programme has welcomed two national clinical advisors and 25 health system clinical leads to work with community MSK providers to improve access to treatment for musculoskeletal conditions and support people back to work.
The appointments follow a further £3.2m of government funding to roll out the programme England-wide, building on a successful pilot with 23 integrated care systems launched in December 2024.
The programme is funded by the government’s Joint Work and Health Directorate and NHS England with the aim of providing system level leadership to support community MSK providers in recovering waiting time performance and transforming their services.
National clinical advisors Joseph Russell, Associate Clinical Director at Allied Health Professionals Suffolk, and Philippa Norris, Advanced Musculoskeletal Physiotherapist at Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust and a First Contact Practitioner in primary care, will focus on developing quality improvement resources and guidance for work and heath initiatives and commissioning within community MSK.
The 25 community MSK system leads will work across ICS clusters to support local MSK providers with the biggest waiting time backlogs to deliver interventions including MSK community appointment days (CADs) – one-day clinics that bring health specialists and mental health support and physical activity services together, allowing people to engage with multiple services in one visit – and ‘super clinics’, which increase clinical capacity by providing one-to-one assessment, targeted treatments and in-depth clinical diagnostics in a single clinic.
They are supported by the already established regional and national teams who have seen success in applying the GIRFT ‘Further Faster’ model in selected systems. This is helping to optimise referrals to community triage and therapies services, ensure timely onward referral to secondary care for urgent conditions and deliver rehabilitation and self-management.
