What the 10-Year Plan Means for Primary Care

The NHS 10-Year Plan puts primary care front and centre of its ambition to create a system that is more digital, preventative and community-based, with care delivered closer to people’s homes and communities. But what does this mean in practice for the staff and services who deliver care on the ground?

Access to primary care has long been a sticking point. In early 2025, data from the Royal College of General Practitioners showed that just over 70% of patients secured a GP appointment within two weeks, but only around 45% were able to see their GP within seven days. These figures highlight that there is still a long road ahead to make progress and meet the government’s pledge for routine appointments within two weeks and same-day access for urgent needs.

The 10-Year Plan commits to tackling these challenges by:

• Ensuring urgent needs are met the same day
• Guaranteeing routine appointments within two weeks
• Improving continuity, particularly for people with long-term conditions
• Expanding neighbourhood hubs staffed not just by GPs, but pharmacists, physiotherapists, and care coordinators

If delivered, this shift could take pressure off individual GPs and spread the workload more effectively across multi-disciplinary teams.

The shift from analogues to digital is another cornerstone of the 10-Year Plan. The NHS App, now used by more than 35 million people, is expected to become the default gateway to primary care, offering a single place for booking appointments, ordering repeat prescriptions and viewing personalised care plans. By 2028, all providers should also be working from integrated patient records, giving GPs, hospitals and community services a shared view of each patient’s history.

Remote consultations, AI-driven triage and digital care navigation are also expected to expand. These innovations should help manage rising demand, but they also raise questions around digital exclusion. Ensuring patients without easy access to smartphones, broadband or confidence online are not left behind will be critical to maintaining equity of access.

Prevention and a focus on proactive care models is also central to the 10-Year Plan’s three core shifts, and primary care will be the frontline of this agenda. By using population health data, practices can identify patients whose conditions are more likely to escalate earlier, then intervene quickly as a result.

Key elements include:

• Scaling up social prescribing, linking patients with community and voluntary services to address non-medical drivers of health.
• Greater use of wearables and technology-enabled care to support hospital-at-home and virtual ward models.
• Stronger ties to public health campaigns on obesity, smoking, alcohol and mental wellbeing.

With nearly 609,000 children and young people on mental health waiting lists in 2024, prevention and early intervention in primary care will be paramount in alleviating the already massive burden on secondary services.

Neighbourhood hubs are also expected to underpin this work, acting as anchors for prevention programmes, community support and early intervention.

The Long-Term Workforce Plan promises thousands more primary care staff over the next decade, including new roles such as physician associates and digital care navigators, however, there are still many challenges to grapple with. The BMA has warned that one in four GP posts are unfilled in some areas (2024), and vacancy rates continue to affect morale and service delivery.

The Plan seeks to shift towards team-based models where pharmacists, physiotherapists and other clinicians share the load. Combined with digital tools such as predictive analytics, smart scheduling and digital dictation tools like Access SmartNotes, this approach could reduce burnout and give patients quicker, more holistic access to care.

The need for this shift was reflected at this year’s NHS Confed event, where CEO of the NHS Confederation, Matthew Taylor, underlined how we “can’t recruit our way out of the workforce crisis unless we also change the model of care” and how “integration and team-based approaches are the future.”

For all the ambition in the 10-Year Plan, primary care continues to face challenges that can’t be solved overnight. Recruitment and retention remain critical, with one in four GP posts unfilled in some regions. Digital access also needs careful balance. While the NHS App and remote consultations expand options for many, older and more vulnerable patients still rely on face-to-face care.

Funding is another uncertainty, with many commitments stretching into the next parliament, and delivery will depend on strong alignment between NHS primary care networks (PCNs), NHS integrated care systems (ICSs) and hospital trusts. Without that, new models risk fragmenting rather than integrating care.

The 10-Year Plan positions primary care as the foundation of an NHS built on digital tools, and community-based, preventative care. If commitments on access, records and workforce are met, practices could finally move beyond firefighting and deliver proactive, patient-centred support.

Success will largely depend on 1) what’s laid out in the forthcoming delivery chapter, and 2) how the proposals will be executed. For GPs, pharmacists, nurses and care coordinators working under intense pressure, the next decade is about turning the collective vision into a tangible reality where every patient, in every community, can access timely, joined-up primary care.