Nearly 4 million GP appointments could be freed up by 2022 under an NHS plan to cut bureaucracy.

The Time for Care programme encourages GP surgeries to be more efficient, by allowing patients to book appointments sooner, cutting paperwork and offering faster access to health specialists.

The programme has been piloted at over 2,000 surgeries since 2016 and will now be rolled out across the country with an aim to cover three quarters of GP practices by 2022.

The latest results from the programme show that 205,000 clinical hours have been freed up which is the equivalent of 1.23 million appointments lasting 10 minutes each. At an average of £30 per appointment NHS England has estimated close to £40 million had been saved.

If the same number of clinical hours saved are achieved over the next three years, it would represent around 3.7 million GP appointments.

Surgeries have freed up GPs’ time by directing patients to other healthcare experts, designing more efficient prescribing systems so patients can request prescriptions online and increasing the number of telephone appointments with GPs.

Time for Care is being funded through NHS England’s £30m GP Forward View programme, which aims to reduce the workload of GP practices, but a NHS England spokesman could not confirm how much of this £30m will be spent on Time for Care.