NHS England head Simon Stevens has announced a funding boost of £2.4bn a year as part of a five-year plan to put general practice “back on its feet”, which will include surgeries working together and patients seeing other health professionals instead of their GP.

The funding comes from existing budgets and is likely to mean cuts in other areas of the NHS. However, health leaders hope that it will lead to a reduction in demand for hospital services, thereby saving the NHS money in the longer term.

As part of the plan’s ambition to lessen GP workloads and speed up access for patients, practices will work together to manage patient demand, increase their opening hours on week nights and weekends and encourage patients to see other professionals where applicable.

To this end, 3,000 therapists, 1,500 pharmacists and 1,000 doctors’ assistants will be drafted in to work in surgeries. In addition, 500 doctors will be recruited from Australia, the Netherlands and India and there will be an increase in the number of doctors being trained in the UK.

According to Mr Stevens, the changes will “take GPs off the treadmill” and enable them to spend more time on in-depth consultations with the patients who are most in need. He added that they were needed because patient satisfaction levels have “slowly eroded” over the past decade.

In addition, practices will be incentivised from 2017-18 to offer online consultations to patients through a £45m fund as part of a new injection of IT funding. One of the priorities of the funding will be an upgrade to the e-referral system, which will allow a two-way conversation between GPs and hospital specialists.

In total, the amount general practice receives will increase from £9.6bn this tax year to more than £12bn by 2021, a 14 per cent increase in real terms.