Ten-year plan will ‘end one size fits all primary care’

“One size fits all” primary care is outdated and will be replaced with services targeted at the needs of different patient groups, rather than “what is convenient to organisations or individual sectors”, the national GP director has said.

Speaking about emerging proposals in the Ten-Year Health Plan and neighbourhood health, Claire Fuller said: “What we’re doing is putting patients’ needs back at the heart of the NHS, trying to make sure care is centred around patients’ needs rather than what is convenient to organisations or individual sectors.

“There is a starting principle that basically says, at different times in peoples’ lives, they have different needs… [If] you think about your children’s needs and how they’d want to access care, [that] would be very different to our parents’ needs. And as professionals we will feel much safer dealing with some people remotely or asynchronously via an email exchange than other people.

“We’ve moved away from the 1948 [model] and have realised now that not one size fits all… The good news is that at the heart of that is a universal primary care offer [and] an increased primary care offer.”

It comes amid rumours the government’s reform plan will propose greater segmentation of primary care, including general practice. This could include creating variable service offers, access and pathways for different groups.

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Source: HSJ, 23 May 2025