Policy Connect's latest report, First Point of Care: A Plan for a better NHS front door through Connected Primary Care, follows a cross-party inquiry led by the All-Party Parliamentary Health Group and chaired by Dr Simon Opher, Lord Kamall of Edmonton, Jess Brown-Fuller and Sadik Al-Hassan.

Jess Brown-Fuller, inquiry co-chair, said: ‘What is clear is there are far too many people struggling to get a GP appointment when they need one, leaving them waiting anxiously for the care they deserve. This has had terrible consequences for people's health and for the NHS. It can lead to important diagnoses being missed or delayed, and can force desperate people to call an ambulance or take themselves to A&E.'

The report identifies five key findings: funding is distributed in ways that do not follow need; community pharmacy, NHS dentistry, and optometry have the weakest foundations; clinicians are trained and then not commissioned to work; organisations outside the NHS are already reaching people primary care does not; and the experiences that patients described matches what the inquiry found: registration failures, fragmented care, unmet need, and national measures that count only the people who were seen.

The inquiry identified that further reform of primary care services in England must be underpinned by a fundamental shift in how NHS resources are allocated. Primary care currently accounts for around 8% of NHS funding, compared with around 43% for acute hospital care.

The report's 13 recommendations can be found here.

The NHS Alliance's director of primary care, community and neighbourhood health, Ruth Rankine, said: ‘To build a true neighbourhood health service, we have to start by strengthening its 'front door' in primary care.

‘To do this we must ensure that the primary landscape is connected and that the skills and capacity that already exist across these services are fully harnessed.

‘The imbalance in the NHS funding model must also be addressed if we genuinely want to prevent ill health, reduce inequalities and keep people well and out of hospital.

‘This report sets out a route to achieving that – through better investment, workforce planning, integrated commissioning and a stronger voice for primary care. This is a sentiment echoed by NHS Alliance members across general practice, community pharmacy, dentistry and optometry.'