Dr. James Martin, GP Partner, Central Vale Cluster Lead, National Cluster Lead Advisor to the Strategic Programme for Primary Care – Cardiff and Vale Primary, Community & Intermediate Care, Strategic Programme for Primary Care
Dr. Martin has been a GP Partner in Barry for the past 14 years, and the Central Vale Cluster Lead for the past 8 years. He took on the role of National Cluster Lead Advisor to the Strategic Programme for Primary care in 2024.
James is temporarily holding the role of the GMS Collaborative Lead for the Central Vale. He is the lead within his practice for Medical Student teaching, and a GP trainer. His practice provides General Practice Medical cover for Ty Hafan, the children’s hospice for Wales.
James is clinical lead for the work to develop urgent primary care within Cardiff and Vale.
James’s interests incude:
From a GMS perspective: cardiology and anticoagulation, medical education, joint injection, ENT (undertaking community microsuction clinics) and paediatric palliative care.
From his other roles, he is interested in strategic transformation and work to improve the interface between primary and secondary care, seeking to break down barriers and facilitate care close to patient’s homes in the community.
James’s cluster has implemented a community pain clinic, wound clinics, pessary clinics, heart failure, and wellbeing and mental health support for patients, amongst many other initiatives. These interventions have had a real impact for patients living in the Central Vale.
At a national level a big focus for Jame is to help deliver the goal of having a shared IT platform to enable clinical information sharing and collaborative community working. This is a fundamental enabler for the ambition to deliver services in the community – ‘community by design’. Implementing an IT solution is necessary for cluster working across Wales, but is also needed for the community hubs (eg Breathlessness and Women’s hubs). There is currently no national IT solution that supports this ambition.
On a wider scale there is a need to ensure all primary care services are able to share clinical information to deliver patient care in the modern world, and this requires work both from an IT software perspective, as well as significant information governance changes.
Delivering modern health care services in the community, in a collaborative, joined up way requires solving these challenges around IT and IG. This is achievable, but must be done at pace, and this is what James is working to try and deliver.
