Each year the NHS provides around 110 million urgent same day patient contacts.

Around 85 million of these are urgent GP appointments and the rest are A&E or minor injuries-type visits.

Some estimates suggest that between 1.5 and 3 million people who attend A&E each year could have their needs addressed in other parts of the urgent care system.

Early in 2017, NHS England and NHS Improvement published the Next Steps on the NHS Five Year Forward View which highlighted the importance of delivering a functionally integrated urgent care service to help address the fragmented nature of out-of-hospital services.

Our aim is to provide care closer to people's homes and help tackle the rising pressures on all urgent care services (primary and hospital) and emergency admissions.

The opportunity to improve the patient's experience of, and clinical outcomes from, urgent care is huge.

NHS England has worked to develop a new national service specification for the provision of an integrated 24/7 urgent care access, clinical advice and treatment service, which incorporates NHS 111 call-handling and former GP out-of-hours services.

This document, developed by South East London (SEL) Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) with input from wider stakeholders, builds on the specification developed by NHS England and is just the starting point to revolutionise the way in which urgent care services are provided and accessed.