A MAJOR £34m investment in primary care services will help provide 24/7 healthcare closer to people’s homes, health and social services Minister Mark Drakeford announced today.

The package of investment will help to support GP practices by recruiting and training more advanced nurses, clinical pharmacists and therapists to work alongside GPs as part of a joined-up primary care team.

This will ensure GPs’ time and professional expertise is used to best effect to care for people with complex conditions, helping to keep them healthy at home and prevent unnecessary hospital admissions.

The investment in primary care and community-based services will also help to move more services, which have traditionally been provided in hospitals, such as eye care, into communities, closer to people’s homes.

The majority of funding – more than £23m – will go directly to health boards and Public Health Wales to implement local primary care plans, improving access to GP services and move care out of hospitals and into the community.

More than £5m will be invested in 19 new projects, which look at new ways of planning, organising and delivering the wide range of services which make up primary care, including: A proactive community-based approach in deprived communities in Aneurin Bevan and Cwm Taf university health board areas to identify people at increased risk of avoidable health problems such as coronary heart disease and diabetes, and work directly with them to reduce that risk.

There will also be two new primary care-based diagnostic and treatment centres for eye problems in Aneurin Bevan University Health Board, which will mean people with glaucoma and wet age-related macular degeneration can be assessed and treated in the community.

Professor Mark Drakeford said: “This significant new package of funding will support a wide range of schemes to make it easier for people to get the right care, at the right time, closer to where they live. It will also help to relieve pressures on GPs by widening access to a broad range of highly-skilled primary care professionals.

“By managing people’s often complex conditions in primary care, we will not just be keeping people out of hospital but we will be treating them closer to their homes and their families.

He added: “Primary care services are those services which are most frequently used by people; which we are most familiar with and we use most frequently. To protect and improve primary care, we are investing in these services; we are shifting the focus away from ill health and hospitals to improve health and care as close to home as possible.”

The £34m of new funding for 2015-16 is in addition to the £6m for primary care services announced in January, which has been allocated directly to Wales’ 64 primary care clusters - groups of GP practices and other primary care professionals, responsible for planning for local health needs – and is part of an overall £40m package of new investment for primary care.