Primary care urgently needs resources to take on more care of chronic illness, say MPs

MPs have called for urgent recruitment and workforce planning in primary care to help deal with an anticipated shift of care of patients with long term conditions from hospitals.

In a report from the parliamentary health select committee, MPs said that the NHS system had to change to support better planning of care of people with chronic conditions.1 The report from the committee’s inquiry into managing the care of people with long term conditions, published on 3 July, said that the issue was not being dealt with properly at the moment and was only likely to get worse as demand grew.

An estimated 15 million NHS patients in England have long term conditions such as …