News / GP investment plan

The national commissioning body’s chief executive Simon Stevens said this would increase funding from £9.6bn in the current financial year to more than £12bn by 2020/21. This was a 14% real terms increase, he added.

An NHS England document, General practice forward view, said the additional funding included £900m of capital investment over the next five years. It would also be supplemented by a sustainability and transformation (STP) package totalling £508m over the period to support struggling practices, further develop the workforce, tackle workload and enable care redesign.

The STP package will include funding for service redesign (£246m), workforce (£206m) and practice resilience (£56m). The service redesign funding will include a requirement on CCGs to provide around £171m of practice transformational support and a new national £30m development programme for general practice.

There will be a new funding formula, which will include deprivation and rurality, to better reflect practice workload and the profession will be consulted on plans to tackle indemnity costs.

Mr Stevens (pictured) 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 10 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.’

The initiative was launched as the Commons Health Committee published a report highlighting the strain on primary care. It called for more to be done to develop, train and retain GPs and the wider primary care workforce in an integrated care system. It also said the government should clarify how its manifesto pledge to enable seven-day access to GP services would be implemented and resourced.

Committee chair Sarah Wollaston added: ‘If we are going to provide the best possible care for people living with increasingly complex long term conditions, then primary care has to be able to change. We need to allow for longer appointments and for people to be cared for by a wider range of professionals.’