Practice leaders in Northern Ireland say they are “confident” the region will see improvements after the regional government put extra cash into primary care.

The region’s government has doubled the cash it is putting into new phone systems for practices to help them manage patient demand. It is also setting aside £3.8 million to help expand services during the winter and putting extra resources into developing GP training. The agreement on the programme contrasts with England where GP leaders were angered last week when the government combined a cash package with threats to “name and shame” practices alleged not to be seeing enough patients.

In Northern Ireland the total invested in practice phone systems is now £3.4 million. Practices in Northern Ireland are now undertaking 200,000 consultations a week.

Health minister Robin Swann said: “Services across Health and Social Care are under increasing pressure and we know that this will be a challenging winter. Feedback from GPs indicates that many patients are presenting with more complex needs, particularly those who have a chronic disease, making it more difficult for them to see all the people they would wish to. Work is under way on a number of fronts to help improve access to primary care services for patients. Further urgent work is progressing with GPs and the Health and Social Care Board to explore how telephony can be better used to support services. Consideration is also being given to ways to better deal with routine requests, such as repeat prescriptions to release capacity.

“This work is part of a wider programme to help improve patient access to services, which includes the wider rollout of primary care multi-disciplinary teams, and work to reform the Out of Hours service. At the same time, work is under way on a review of GP trainee places, to make sure we have enough GPs to meet our primary care needs into the future. I am committed to ensuring that we have a GP workforce that is supported, motivated and sustainable and that continues to provide quality care to patients when they need it.”

Regional British Medical Association GP chair Dr Alan Stout said: “Hopefully it will help some of the immediate pressures that GPs are facing as well as beginning to address some of the more systemic and complex issues, including the number of GP trainee places available. General practice has not closed and never closed. Consultation rates and the number of patients contacting their surgery continue to be high and the current system is struggling to cope. All of our staff are feeling the pressure and we recognise that the difficulty in access and delays in seeing your GP cause frustration to patients. But we really are doing our best.

“This funding will help us address some immediate issues around telephony and the issues patients face in contacting their surgery. Combined with the expanded roll-out of multi-disciplinary teams and improvements to out of hours we are confident that patients will see improvements and equally importantly GPs will feel under less pressure and able to focus on what they do best, caring for patients.”