Extra £2.4bn announced for GP services

An extra £2.4 billion a year has been earmarked to improve general practice services by 2020/21.

The additional funding was announced by Simon Stevens, chief of NHS England, and aims to ‘get general practice back on its feet’ by improving patient care and access, as well as investing in new ways of providing primary care.

The announcement means that spending will rise from £9.6 billion in 2016/17 to over £12 billion by 2021, which NHS England says represents a 14 per cent increase in real-terms.

The money comes part of a wider plan that contains steps to strengthen workforce, drive efficiencies in workload, modernise infrastructure and technology, and redesign the way modern primary care is offered to patients.

Part of this will include actions to double the growth rate in GPS, through new incentives for training, recruitment and retention, and well a new practice resilience programme to support struggling practices and better support for GPs suffering from burnout and stress.

Simon Stevens said: “GPs are by far the largest branch of British medicine, and as a recent British Medical Journal headline put it – if general practice fails, the whole NHS fails. So if anyone ten years ago had said: “Here’s what the NHS should now do – cut the share of funding for primary care and grow the number of hospital specialists three times faster than GPs”, they’d have been laughed out of court.

“But looking back over a decade, that’s exactly what’s happened. Which is why it’s no great surprise that a recent international survey revealed British GPs are under far greater pressure than their counterparts, with rising workload matched by growing patient concerns about convenient access. So rather than ignore these real pressures, the NHS has at last begun openly acknowledging them. Now we need to act, and this plan sets out exactly how.”

Arvind Madan, NHS England director of primary care, said: “We are acutely aware of the pressures GPs are facing right now and the need to get on track as quickly as possible. This means that practices, working together, will benefit from access to support if they are struggling to meet patient’s needs, reductions in unnecessary workload, more opportunities to recruit staff and a chance to improve use of their technology or premises.

“We know this is just the start of the journey but we are determined to get this right for the benefit of patients, GPs and the wider healthcare system.”