Collaborative working in primary care groups: A case of incommensurable paradigms?

Abstract

AB S T R A C T The aim of this paper is to examine the role of health promotion in locality commissioning teams-as pre-cursors of Primary Care Groups-drawing on the experiences of a project in the West Midlands. Wider implications for the workings of the new Primary Care Groups will be drawn. The paper will consider some fundamental differences between health promotion and other public health approaches. Using a model of health promotion practice, it will show how the practice of different stakeholders in locality commissioning can be made sense of by these different and in some cases incommensurable paradigms. Our argument is that being able to model practice so as to make these paradigmatic differences explicit and to acknowledge diversity and inconsistency is a prerequisite for healthy collaboration.