Video chats with a doctor are coming to a surgery near you after West Cheshire GPs won a slice of £100m Government funding.

Thirty-seven practices successfully bid for nearly £3.8m from the Prime Minister’s Challenge Fund for radical changes that will help revolutionise the local NHS.

West Cheshire Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), which will match-fund the project, is delighted to be selected as one of a number of pilots across the country aimed at boosting access to GP services and spreading innovation.

Chief officer Alison Lee said: “We believe a lot of what the NHS has got to do is catch up to the technological innovations that you have in many other industries like email and Skype. How to book appointments with a GP is still very much over the phone. I don’t know any other industry that’s like that any more.”

Some of the funding will go into web-based and smart phone technology to allow doctors to hold Skype and phone consultations or send text messages as an alternative to face-to-face consultations.

“What we’ve got to do is make sure there are other options than perhaps always going to see your own doctor,” added Mrs Lee.

There will be more opportunity for patients to book appointments and request repeat prescriptions online. There will be continued emphasis on people receiving advice and treatment from their pharmacist for a wide range of minor ailments.

Mrs Lee continued: “Sometimes you just want to go and get a prescription, sometime you just want advice, you don’t necessarily always need to see that as a face-to-face consultation.

“For older and frail people who are going to want to walk up to their GP practice and book over the phone, we still need to do that. But for many other people they want options other than doing that. So there’s a lot of money around the investment in the technology, the computer systems and the phone systems, to get that right.

“But also there’s lots of work with Age UK we are doing so people can perhaps navigate to the voluntary sector if that’s what they need.”

Other elements of the plan include longer opening hours during the week, possibly up to 9.30pm, and opening on Saturdays and Sundays. GPs will work in partnership with multi-disciplinary teams of health and social care staff to offer wrap-around support.

There will be greater use of teleworking so patients with long-term conditions can live independently at home while linked into equipment monitored remotely. Patients will be able to access a physiotherapist directly without first seeing a GP.

Dr Huw Charles-Jones, a Lache GP and chair of West Cheshire CCG, said: “It’s not money for more of the same. It’s money for a different sort of GP practice that fits into the way the NHS is going which is moving care away from hospitals into the community.

“Practices working together, working with their own community and working with the third sector better and learning from best practice across the country.

“It will see a move from 37 individual practices to bigger groups of practices. The challenge, I think, for us is we need to balance that working at scale – in terms of offering more for patients – while retaining the personal care that individual practices give.”