By 2025 a million more UK people will be living with life threatening conditions, warns royal college

One million more people in the United Kingdom will be living with multiple long term, life threatening conditions by 2025, an analysis by the Royal College of General Practitioners has found. This increase will cost general practice up to £1.2bn (€1.6bn; $1.8bn) a year, the college said.

Speaking at the college’s annual conference in Glasgow on Thursday, Maureen Baker, its chair, said that it was paradoxical that most NHS funding was spent on hospital care rather than general practice.

“We need an NHS that’s properly set up to meet the complex clinical needs of people in the 21st century. We need an NHS that can achieve this in a cost effective way, supporting people to stay out of hospital and live as independently as possible,” Baker said. “And we need an NHS that is caring and person centred, because we know that clinical need so often overlaps with psychological and social factors. We all know what this is: it’s called general practice.”

Baker dismissed plans for seven day working in the NHS in England as “living in cloud cuckoo land” and said the plans were a “recipe for disaster,” given the current resources. Addressing the health secretary for England, Jeremy Hunt, Baker said, “If you don’t shore up existing GP care as your top priority, not only will you not get a seven day service, but you won’t have a five day service either—because you will have completely decimated general practice.”

Baker said that she had five demands that would stabilise general practice and make it a more appealing career option. She called for the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, to announce a costed plan to ensure that general practice received 11% of the overall NHS budget, including an immediate injection of £750m of additional core funding in the next financial year.

She called for an increase in the GP workforce, financial incentives to attract medical students to general practice, and sanctions on medical schools that failed to tackle bias against general practice.

Baker also said that there needed to be an urgent rethink of the bureaucracy involved in Care Quality Commission inspections, better use of technology in practices, and freedom for GPs to create new models of care.

She said, “General practice is the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the NHS—our only hope—but this can only be the case with substantial investment in our service and thousands more GPs right across the UK. This is the only way we can transform our NHS so that it meets the changing needs of patients.”