[Chrysalis]

One could argue the UK needs to do the same if it is not prepared to increase public spending to fix the shortfall then we could adopt the french policy of making it income dependent, a good friend of mine told me of some of the better things about the french health system, e.g. in the UK if you need an X ray, you get sent to the hospital to have one, in France they have X ray machines at the GP surgery, thats just plain common sense, it makes things faster and more efficient.

To me I would adopt the following to improve workload on the system.

Grant extra powers to pharmacists to issue prescriptions.
Make some drugs not require a prescription when used in low dosage. So e.g. antibiotics, you can get issued one set without prescription per year, more require prescription which can be issued by either GP or pharmacist.
Implement more stuff to be carried out at GP surgery, such as X rays.
GPs open 7 days a week and 12 hours a day.
Ban doctors from doing private work if they wish to pull in a NHS salary.
Let HC1 cert owners reclaim travel costs to see GP (currently they dont). This can reduce home visits required.
Add video conference facilities. To reduce people needing to attend surgery for physical examinations.
Add email contact mechanism between patients and their GP, a GP can take 1 minute to respond to single query over email vs allocating a 5-10 min booking slot for someone to come in to ask the same question.

There is more but these I thought of off the top of my head quite easily.