If proposals by a Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) for GPs to provide urgent care in core hours to help cut A&E attendance are taken up, practices may see their funding boosted by up to 35 per cent.

A consultation document published last week by East Leicestershire and Rutland CCG put forward the proposal to involve GPs in providing urgent care services, mainly out of hours and at weekends.

The CCG said that it is increasing its urgent care budget by around 5 per cent and that if the preferred option of three proposals were chosen, practices that provided the urgent walk-in centres could boost their income by 35 per cent.

As part of the consultation process, patients in the area are being asked to give feedback on three options for providing local, urgent care services, with the CCG stating that investment in primary care is the most effective way.

The CCG has already identified that 48 per cent of the 120,000 attendances to urgent care services are patients presenting at A&E with minor injuries or illnesses, when a more appropriate service was available.

Inappropriate A&E attendances cost the CCG as much as four times more than a patient presenting at their GP practice or urgent care centre, at £81 per A&E attendance compared with £20 to £47 elsewhere.

Since GP practices are paid to provide the same illness services in the daytime, this means that by continuing to keep minor injury units open in the day the CCG is paying twice for making the same type of service available.

The CCG’s report noted that patients might be concerned that this will cause longer waiting times due to practices already at capacity with their registered patients. However, all of its practices have said that patients would not have to wait longer than two hours for minor injury treatment.