GPs get £40 million to reach 300,000 vulnerable patients before winter puts them in hospital
Practices will be paid to find the patients most likely to become seriously unwell this winter and support them at home, with health checks, medication reviews and respiratory clinics, in a programme ministers say is meant to keep avoidable admissions down.
General practice is being given a ring-fenced £40 million this winter to get to vulnerable patients before their conditions deteriorate into a hospital admission. The programme, set out on Monday by the Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, and the Health and Social Care Secretary, Yvette Cooper, is expected to reach as many as 300,000 people in England, and is presented as one part of a wider build-up of NHS capacity ahead of the coldest months.
The money follows the patient rather than the practice in general. Surgeries will pick out the people on their lists judged most likely to become seriously unwell, and primary care networks, the groups through which neighbouring practices work together, can claim £126 for each eligible patient they support. The conditions named are frailty and heart disease, together with emphysema and the other chronic lung conditions grouped as COPD. The help on offer runs from medication reviews and health checks to clinics for respiratory patients led by nurses, with home assessments among the forms of support described by NHS England's primary care director, Dr Amanda Doyle. Since October, practices have also had more freedom to spend reimbursement funding on locum GPs as demand rises.
Mr Burnham argued that hospitals can only be relieved if problems are caught earlier, saying the aim was to catch people “before a small problem turns into a trip to A&E”. Ms Cooper said the plan would give the frailest patients more support in the community through the winter months, and pointed to a heavy summer, driven by heat, as the backdrop against which services are now preparing for winter: vaccination, extra urgent care capacity and closer working with social care all form part of the same preparation, on her account.
If we want to take the pressure off our hospitals this winter, we’ve got to keep people well at home.Andy Burnham, Prime Minister
The GP money sits inside a larger winter package. The Budget gave the NHS £190 million for winter pressures, and £140 million is funding 14 urgent care schemes, with a further 25 new or expanded sites due to open this winter. Among them is a same-day emergency care unit at William Harvey Hospital in Ashford, Kent, which opened on 20 October at a cost of £29 million and is expected to take an additional 60 patients a day, against the roughly 350 a day its emergency department normally sees.
Prevention figures were offered as evidence that the groundwork has begun. Flu vaccination in England had reached more than 13.6 million people by 1 November, about 300,000 ahead of the same point last year, and 2.4 million school-aged children had been vaccinated, almost half a million more than a year earlier. The department also set out its workforce case: more than 2,800 additional GPs compared with July 2024, over 30,500 fully qualified full-time equivalent GPs in post, described as the highest number in over a decade, and more than 400 million appointments delivered in the past year, around 24 million more than in the equivalent period before July 2024.
Reactions from the professions welcomed the direction while pressing on duration and funding. Professor Victoria Tzortziou Brown, president of the Royal College of GPs, welcomed the emphasis on prevention, but warned in the announcement itself that “short-term initiatives alone” cannot deliver sustained improvement for patients with complex needs. The Royal College of Nursing, responding in Press Association reporting of the announcement, welcomed the scheme while calling it the beginning, rather than the substance, of long-term investment in the general practice nursing workforce. Health Minister Karin Smyth told Times Radio, in the same reporting, that the money was not additional funding: it had been moved from elsewhere within general practice budgets for the financial year ending in April 2027, a point the Government's own announcement does not address.
None to date. The Journal corrects errors promptly and transparently. Read our corrections policy.
