GP practices will be paid quarterly for expanded health checks on people with learning disabilities as part of the Directed Enhanced Service (DES), which the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) believes will help “hard-pressed” GP budgets.

The existing DES, which pays practices to offer annual health checks to patients aged 18 or over with the most complex needs, will be extended to include 14 to 17-year-olds from tomorrow (April 1), following negotiations over the 2014/15 GMS contract.

Therefore, the quality and outcomes framework (QOF) learning disabilities register will be extended from the current guidance of people aged over 18 to include everyone with a learning disability from birth.

However, earlier this year, almost half the GPs surveyed in a poll said that they were considering opting out of the unplanned admissions DES agreed for 2014/15, which is worth around £20,000 per average practice, amid fears it will consume huge amounts of practice time.

Under the terms of the 2014/15 contract, 38 per cent of the QOF will be removed to reduce bureaucracy but a third of GPs now believe that the performance-related pay framework should be scrapped.

Meanwhile, of 328 GPs responding to the poll, less than a quarter said that the potential loss of up to £10,000 in practice income from the transfer of QOF points into core pay was not a price worth paying for freeing up staff time and more predictable funding.

Separately, NHS England announced last week that Personal Medical Services (PMS) practices will benefit from changes in the GMS contract that saw money removed from the QOF and DES and invested in the Global Sum.