Why continuity of care matters

Most capacity conversations are about how much work comes in: how many contacts, how many hours, how far over a safe limit. Continuity is about a different thing — how much of that work comes back.

When a patient sees the doctor who already knows them, the consultation does not usually take longer. What changes is what happens next: how soon they need to be seen again, how many tests get ordered, how likely they are to end up somewhere more expensive than your surgery.

That makes continuity a capacity variable. It is one of the few things a practice can change that affects demand rather than just absorbing it.

What it does to the work coming back to you

The largest study of this used 10 million consultations from 381 English practices over 11 years. When a patient saw their usual GP, the interval before their next appointment was 18.1% longer. Consultation length was no different.Kajaria-Montag 2024

The same research group looked at what happens after a single acute consultation. Seeing the regular GP lengthened the gap to the next visit by about 9% — roughly one fewer appointment for every ten consultations. Seeing a GP who was not the patient's regular GP was associated with 11.1% more emergency admissions within seven days and 19.1% more tests ordered.Kajaria-Montag 2025

The word for this is failure demand: work that exists only because the first attempt did not finish the job. Someone comes back because the story had to start again.

Scale it up and the numbers are modest but real. If every practice in that dataset had reached the continuity of the best-performing practices, and had directed it at the patients who benefit most, total consultation demand would have fallen by up to 5.2%.Kajaria-Montag 2024

That is not a solution to a workforce gap. It is about a fortnight of appointments a year, found without hiring anyone.

What it does for patients

A systematic review published in 2025 pooled 18 studies covering around 15 million patients. Higher personal continuity with a GP probably reduces premature mortality by 10-15%, hospital admissions by 10-15%, and emergency department attendances by 10-20%. The authors rated all three as moderate certainty, and found the effect was dose-dependent — more continuity, more benefit — across different countries and different ways of measuring it.Engström 2025

Norway can measure this over a lifetime, because patients are listed with a named GP. Across 4.55 million people, those who had been with the same GP for more than 15 years, compared with one year, had 30% less out-of-hours use, 28% fewer acute hospital admissions, and 25% lower mortality.Sandvik 2022

In England, among 230,000 patients aged 62 to 82, seeing the usual GP two more times out of every ten visits was associated with 6% fewer admissions for conditions that good primary care is supposed to keep out of hospital — asthma, diabetes, chest infections.Barker 2017

The pattern across all of these is the same: the sicker and more complex the patient, the more continuity is worth. The gains in the English productivity study were largest for older patients, patients with several long-term conditions, and patients with mental health diagnoses.Kajaria-Montag 2024

Continuity and access are not opposites

The usual objection is that continuity costs access — that protecting a patient's link to one GP means someone waits longer.

The Health Foundation funded five projects across more than 45 practices and 500,000 patients to test exactly that. Between 2018 and 2020, patient-reported continuity fell nationally from 49% to 45%. The practices in the programme held theirs at 49%, with no measured detriment to timely access. When patients were asked, 61% said they would wait longer to see the GP they preferred.Health Foundation 2022

The evaluation's own conclusion was that continuity and timely access are not opposing principles. The mechanism is the one in section 2: a practice with better continuity has less demand arriving at it, and lower demand is what access is made of.

Why it is getting harder

Continuity in England has been falling for years. In the GP Patient Survey, the share of patients who said they always or almost always saw their preferred GP was 26% in 2018 and 16% by 2023. It reads as 19% in 2025 — but the question changed that year, from "preferred GP" to "preferred healthcare professional". Your practice's number will look better than its own history for reasons that have nothing to do with your practice.GP Patient Survey

The structural reason is not mysterious. Between September 2015 and December 2024 the number of full-time-equivalent GPs in England fell by 2%, while non-medical clinical staff in general practice rose by 428% from 2020. More clinicians, seen by each patient less often.Marshall 2025

And the patients who gain most from continuity get least of it. That pattern has a name in the literature — the inverse continuity law.Dineen 2025

The 2025/26 GP contract in England asks Primary Care Networks to risk-stratify their patients and identify those who would benefit most from continuity. It does not ask anyone to measure continuity, or say how to deliver it to the patients identified.Dineen 2025

How good is this evidence?

Worth being straight about this, because it changes what you should conclude.

All of it is observational. None of it is a randomised trial, and a trial of this would be very hard to run. That means confounding cannot be ruled out: patients who see the same GP repeatedly may differ from those who do not in ways the analyses could not fully adjust for.

What raises the confidence is consistency. The same direction of effect turns up across different countries, different health systems, different continuity measures, and different decades — and it gets stronger as continuity increases rather than appearing all at once. That dose-response is why the 2025 review rated mortality, admissions and emergency attendances at moderate certainty rather than low.Engström 2025

The honest summary: the association is large, consistent and hard to explain away, and the causal claim is probable rather than proven.

Sources

1. Kajaria-Montag H, Freeman M, Scholtes S. Continuity of Care Increases Clinical Productivity in Primary Care. Management Science 2024;70(11):7943-796010 million consultations, 381 English practices, 11 years.
2. Kajaria-Montag H et al. Continuity and locum use for acute consultations: observational study of subsequent workload. Br J Gen Pract 2025;75(752):e181observational study of acute consultations and subsequent workload.
3. Engström S et al. Personal GP continuity improves healthcare outcomes in primary care populations: a systematic review. Br J Gen Pract 2025;75(757):e518systematic review of 18 observational studies, approximately 15 million patients.
4. Sandvik H, Hetlevik Ø, Blinkenberg J, Hunskaar S. Continuity in general practice as predictor of mortality, acute hospitalisation, and use of out-of-hours care. Br J Gen Pract 2022;72(715):e84national registry study, 4,552,978 Norwegian patients, 2018.
5. Barker I, Steventon A, Deeny SR. Association between continuity of care in general practice and hospital admissions for ambulatory care sensitive conditions. BMJ 2017;356:j84230,000 patients aged 62-82 in England.
6. Increasing Continuity of Care in General Practice: final independent evaluation. The Health Foundation, 2022independent evaluation of 5 projects, 45+ practices, over 500,000 patients, 2019-2021.
7. GP Patient Survey, Ipsos for NHS EnglandGP Patient Survey, England.
8. Marshall M et al. What makes general practice work: the role of continuity in efficient and sustainable primary care. Br J Gen Pract 2025;75(757):373editorial on continuity, efficiency and sustainability.
9. Dineen M et al. Delivering relational continuity of care in light of recent GP contract changes. Br J Gen Pract 2025;75(757):342analysis of relational continuity under recent GP contract changes.
10. Tammes P et al. The impact of a named GP scheme on continuity of care and emergency hospital admission. BMJ Open 2019;9:e029103cohort study of older patients in England, 2012-2016.
11. Coombs C et al. Primary care micro-teams: an international systematic review of patient and healthcare professional perspectives. Br J Gen Pract 2023;73(734):e651international systematic review of 24 studies of primary care micro-teams.
12. Saxionis I et al. Is Adopting a Microteams Model a Solution to Delivering Continuity of Care in Modern Primary Care? J Prim Care Community Health 2026single PCN of 46,500 patients across 8 sites, Southampton, before-and-after, March 2022 to March 2024.
13. Fox C et al. Delivering relational continuity of care in UK general practice: a scoping review. BJGP Open 2024;8(2)scoping review, UK general practice.