£34m funding to move more care into the community

A major £34m investment in primary care services will help provide 24/7 healthcare closer to people’s homes, Health and Social Services Minister Mark Drakeford announced today.

The package of investment will help to support GP practices by recruiting and training more advanced nurses, clinical pharmacists and therapists to work alongside GPs as part of a joined-up primary care team.

This will ensure GPs’ time and professional expertise is used to best effect to care for people with complex conditions, helping to keep them healthy at home and prevent unnecessary hospital admissions.

The investment in primary care and community-based services will also help to move more services, which have traditionally been provided in hospitals, such as eye care, into communities, closer to people’s homes.

The majority of funding – more than £23m – will go directly to health boards and Public Health Wales to implement local primary care plans, improving access to GP services and move care out of hospitals and into the community.

More than £5m will be invested in 19 new projects, which look at new ways of planning, organising and delivering the wide range of services which make up primary care, including:

• A proactive community-based approach in deprived communities in Aneurin Bevan and Cwm Taf university health board areas to identify people at increased risk of avoidable health problems such as coronary heart disease and diabetes, and work directly with them to reduce that risk
• A new scheme to attract GPs to North Wales
• A mobile unit in Abertawe Bro Morgannwg University Health Board staffed by a nurse and GP who will respond to emergency situations in the community, helping to prevent people being admitted to hospital
• Two new primary care-based diagnostic and treatment centres for eye problems in Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, which will mean people with glaucoma and wet age-related macular degeneration can be assessed and treated in the community
• Pharmacists in Cwm Taf University Health Board will work closely with communities on an innovative Your Medicines Your Health initiative to improve individuals’ medicines management
• A pooling of back office support and other clinical support functions across primary care providers in Hywel Dda University Health Board to make better use of available resources
• Powys Teaching Health Board is setting up a new call handling and nurse triage model to signpost people to the most appropriate service for their needs
• Cardiff and Vale University Health Board will invest in the primary care service it provides to asylum seekers arriving in Wales.

Professor Mark Drakeford said:

“This significant new package of funding will support a wide range of schemes to make it easier for people to get the right care, at the right time, closer to where they live. It will also help to relieve pressures on GPs by widening access to a broad range of highly-skilled primary care professionals.

“By managing people’s often complex conditions in primary care, we will not just be keeping people out of hospital but we will be treating them closer to their homes and their families.

“Primary care services are those services which are most frequently used by people; which we are most familiar with and we use most frequently. To protect and improve primary care, we are investing in these services; we are shifting the focus away from ill health and hospitals to improve health and care as close to home as possible.”

The £34m of new funding for 2015-16 is in addition to the £6m for primary care services announced in January, which has been allocated directly to Wales’ 64 primary care clusters – groups of GP practices and other primary care professionals, responsible for planning for local health needs – and is part of an overall £40m package of new investment for primary care.