The demand and capacity PCN pilot sites commissioned last year are starting to see an impact, according to the national medical director at NHS England, Dr Claire Fuller.
The 22 pilot sites were chosen in September 2024 to test demand and capacity, with those taking part receiving up to £1.5m in additional funding.
One of those pilot sites, Frome PCN, told our sister title Pulse PCN in April that it was just starting to measure against metrics that month, including call waiting times.
Speaking at an NHS England board meeting on 23 September, Dr Fuller said these pilots had now started to see an impact, and were able to work more on proactive care, managing long term conditions and more complex patients.
In an update on access in primary care, she was asked the question ‘why has it got better?’, as the number of appointments are increasing in general practice, and what difference has it made.
She said: ‘The reason why GP access has improved so much is that we had a plan and we’ve delivered the plan.’
Within this, she spoke of the investment in cloud-based telephony, changing the operating model so practices struggling with access can be supported through the GP improvement plan, and adopting more technology.
‘We’ve increased the amount of online access but also use of the app so that so there’s an increase in the number of people that are accessing and ordering their repeat prescriptions via the app takes a lot of traffic out of calls coming to general practice,’ she said.
Dr Fuller said the pilot sites had demonstrated that this was making a difference to patient care.
She said: ‘On [the] second point about ‘has this made any difference?’, what we’ve found from the PCN test site pilots is that for those practices that have got their access under control, and by access under control I mean that they’re answering their calls within one to two minutes consistently across the day including at 8am, and that they can offer on the day appointments to people that need it.
‘When they’ve done that, they’ve then got the headspace that they can start to properly deal with the proactive care, start to look after their complex patients and start to increase their management of long term conditions. So where they’ve done that, you can start to see the impact.’
However, she added that this was the case in ‘small pockets’ and that now the task was to ‘scale it’.
Dr Neha Bhagi, clinical director at Frome PCN, spoke on the Pulse PCN podcast in July on their experience of the pilot.
She said: ‘It’s given us lots of different opportunities in terms of enabling us to look at our clinical capacity, including recruiting additional staff from GPs to a pharmacist lead, we’ve also got an evaluation lead now and a health psychologist.’
The pilot is intended to run until March 2027, with funding expected to end when the programme closes.
A version of this story was first published on our sister title Pulse PCN.
