GP deal hailed as ‘breakthrough moment’ and will change how you can book appointments with your doctor in England from October
A GP plan has been unveiled intended to end the dreaded “8am scramble” to call for an appointment with your doctor.
The “breakthrough moment” for the NHS has seen agreement with the doctors’ union and key changes aimed at helping more people see the same GP. One key amendment to the contract will mean that from October patients will always be able to request appointments online throughout working hours.
This should free up the phones for elderly people and those unable to request an appointment via the internet. Some GP practices already offer this but the agreement means this will now be rolled out nationwide.
The plan aimed to replace the 8am scramble to get appointments over the phone with a system where the team can better triage and prioritise patients based on medical need.
Some will be offered an urgent face-to-face appointment while others may be offered a phone consultation so the doctor can find out more about their condition first. Less urgent and straight forward sounding complaints are likely to be deprioritised and these patients offered an appointment some days later.
GP practices will be paid more for identifying patients who would benefit most from regularly seeing the same family doctor who will know their history and reduce the requirement for patients to repeat themselves during each appointment. Practice teams will be encouraged to identify patients with the greatest need that would most benefit from seeing the same clinician at every appointment.
Up to £80 million of funding will also be made available for GPs to liaise with specialist consultants, which can avoid people being added onto hospital waiting lists unnecessarily.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting said: “This is a breakthrough moment that’s going to deliver real results for patients, because with this reform, and with this contract, comes the reform that will deliver online access appointment booking for patients up and down the country to bring the NHS into the 21st century, along with all the other services we have at our fingertips at the touch of a button.”
The reforms are part of the government’s Plan for Change to “make general practice fit for the future”. Other changes intended to help free up GPs involve the scrapping of “red tape”.
Under the new GP contract the Government has removed nearly half of the “box-ticking targets” that GPs must report their progress against. Targets like those requiring practices to report on staff wellbeing meetings or to explain how they are reviewing staff access to IT systems are among the 32 being scrapped. Total GP targets have been cut from 76 to 44.
Patients will also gain clearer information about the care they can expect to receive through an “online patient charter”. This will outline the NHS services available to them.
Mr Streeting has signed off the biggest boost to GP funding since 2019, awarding GPs almost £1 billion extra on top of existing budgets. The 7.2% boost to the GP contract is faster than the 5.8% growth to the NHS budget as a whole – in line with one of the Government’s “three shifts” to reprioritise spending to the community to keep people out of hospitals.
Mr Streeting said on Friday says “well over 900” additional GPs have been recruited since Labour came to power last summer. Previous Conservative governments repeatedly promised to increase GP numbers by many thousands but the total actually went down as overworked doctors quit or retired early.
Dr Becks Fisher, a practicing GP and Director of Research and Policy at the Nuffield Trust health thinktank, said: “Patients, GPs and their teams desperately want improvements to general practice. This contract offers a glimmer of hope.
“This is the first time in years that a contract has been agreed mutually rather than imposed on the profession by the government. Today marks the end of collective action by GPs, signalling a real shift in relations between the profession and Government. However, this contract alone does not solve many of the huge challenges that remain in general practice.
“There is still a long way to go to restore patient satisfaction with GP services, to attract and retain GPs and to improve the premises they’re practising from.
“For too long, general practice has been underfunded. A decent chunk of the 7.2% uplift announced today will be swallowed up by increases in Employer National Insurance Contributions. But government is making good on commitments to boost the proportion of NHS funding going to general practice, and GPs will welcome the direction of travel.
“An important next step will be to address the unfair distribution of funding between richer and poorer areas, which has been a long-standing problem with the current GP funding formula.”