Exploring the impact of the national extended access scheme on patient experience of and satisfaction with general practice: an observational study using the English GP Patient Survey.

Extended access has a cost of an estimated 250 million GBP per year. While there is a body of work that finds associations with emergency department use reduction, at a practice population level, in this study it has been found that extended access had no measurable impact. This may be because extended access services are only used by a small number of patients, and its introduction has not significantly impacted general practices and most general practice patients.