GP practices to be required to keep online consultations ‘open’ during core hours

GP practices will be contractually required to keep their online consultation tool ‘open’ during core hours regardless of capacity.

From October, practices will need to keep the tool open from 8am to 6:30pm for ‘non-urgent appointment requests, medication queries and admin requests’.

This forms part of the 2025/26 GP contract which is due to come into effect 1 April and which has been agreed via a deal ‘in principle’ with the BMA.

NHSE’s primary care director Dr Amanda Doyle said: ‘We want patients to contact their practice, by phone, online or by walking in, and for people to have an equitable experience across these access modes. This will be a key intervention in the government’s ambition to end the 8am scramble.

‘From 1 October 2025 practices will be required to keep their online consultation tool open for the duration of core hours for non-urgent appointment requests, medication queries and admin requests.

‘This will be subject to necessary safeguards in place to avoid urgent clinical requests being erroneously submitted online.’

Practices will also have to publish a ‘patient charter’ setting out the standard of care they are contracted to provide, which will also include guidance on how patients can contract their practice during core hours.

In the past few years practices were advised to switch off their online consultation systems ‘at a minimum’ outside core hours and consider disabling them during core hours as a response to ‘unmanageable and unsafe workload’.

The 2025/26 contract changes also mean that by 1 October, GPs will be required to allow ‘read-only access’ to patients’ care records (via GP Connect Access Record HTML and Structured) to other NHS providers and in some cases to private providers, following ‘explicit permission’ from the patient.

Practices will also be required to allow community pharmacy to send consultation summaries into the GP practice workflow, using GP Connect Update Record.

The contract changes also include a new requirement to record patient safety events at the practice ‘about the services delivered’.

This is to contribute to the national NHS-wide data source to ‘support learning, improvement and learning culture’, the commissioner said.

This will also enable the practice to record patient safety events occurring in other health care settings (for instance if a GP practice wished to record an unsafe discharge from hospital).

In July last year, GPs across England took urgent action to remove a GP Connect functionality from their systems as part of collective action.

Last year, the BMA said it would ‘challenge’ the contract requirement for GP practices to keep their online systems switched on until 6.30pm regardless of capacity.