GPs have voted to reduce visits to patients’ homes, saying they “no longer have the capacity” to offer them.

Doctors supported the proposal at a meeting of English local medical committees in London on Friday.

It means British Medical Association (BMA) representatives will lobby NHS England to stop home visits being a contractual obligation.

However, the plans face opposition from Health Secretary Matt Hancock and the Royal College of GPs (RCGP).

Mr Hancock said taking home visits out of GPs’ contracts is a “complete non-starter”.

RCGP chair Professor Martin Marshall said home visits should be used wisely but insisted they are a “core part” of general practice.

An NHS spokeswoman said GPs would still visit patients at home where there was a clinical need to do so.

According to NHS Digital, in one month in 2018, GPs in England made 238,579 home visits out of a total of 27,084,027 appointments.

Paper prescriptions will be scrapped next month under an NHS plan to save £300m over two years, with Jo Churchill, the primary care minister, announcing all prescriptions across England will be digitised.

The electronic prescription service (EPS) will be rolled out nationally after a trial run in 60 GP practices and hundreds of pharmacies.

At least 70% of all prescriptions are already being prescribed and dispensed through EPS and the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has already received positive feedback from GPs and pharmacies.

The first EPS went live in 2009 at a GP surgery and pharmacy in Leeds. Once the final stage is rolled out, nearly all prescriptions will be sent electronically.

Under the electronic system, patients can get their medications by either nominating a pharmacy that will receive the details directly from their GP or receive a paper prescription with the digital barcode.

The medical information is held on a secure NHS database called Spine and will allow a patient’s prescription to be accessed quickly by GPs and pharmacies.

The EPS is expected to save the NHS £300m by 2021 by increasing efficiencies, reducing the amount of paper processing and prescribing errors, the DHSC said.

For 40 minutes an elderly man sat on a bench in a busy city centre park – alone.

He was ignored by the passing dog walkers, joggers, parents with pushchairs and teenagers with headphones, all too busy to even say “hello”.

Did he want company? Did he want to be alone? Did anyone actually care?

It was enough to move one woman to try and get strangers to chat, helping inspire a movement that has spread across the world.

“There was some of that British reserve that made me think he may think me weird if I sat next to him,” said Allison Owen-Jones, 53, from Cardiff.

“Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple way to let people know you’re open to a chat, I thought.

“So I came up with the idea of tying a sign that would open the avenues for people. I didn’t want it to sound too vulnerable so I wrote, ‘Happy to chat bench. Sit here if you don’t mind someone stopping to say hello’.

“All of a sudden, you’re not invisible anymore.”

The idea in May this year led Allison to laminate cards and begin tying them to benches in parks around her home city.

It was a blissfully simple idea to tackle loneliness that swiftly created a buzz.

The Senior Citizen Liaison Team charity took the idea a step further.

It has already set up partnerships with both Avon and Somerset Police and Gwent Police to have permanent benches across their areas and arrange volunteers to “chat-bench”.

After a bad fall at home, Linda Jones spent three weeks in hospital. Fearing she might fall again, the discharge coordinator at the Royal Gwent hospital in Newport arranged for an assessment of her house. Within 48 hours she had a handrail in the hallway and grab rails in the downstairs toilet.

While there is nothing odd in making minor home adaptations to prevent falls – the single biggest cause of hospital admissions of older people – the speed of this intervention is unusual. All too often, applications for even the simplest practical aids are held up for months in the mistaken belief they require approval by an occupational therapist.

A survey last year by the Equality and Human Rights Commission found the average wait for an adaptation was 22 weeks – eight weeks for a decision, then 14 for installation – with some local councils taking more than a year.

New guidance aims to tackle the problem. Adaptations Without Delay, commissioned by the Royal College of Occupational Therapists (RCOT) and drawn up by the Housing Learning and Improvement Network, sets out a decision-making framework to grade different types of adaptations and advise when they can be authorised and installed without going through the full process.

“Adaptations play a crucial role in prevention and need to be delivered in a timely manner,” says Karin Bishop, RCOT director of professional operations. “We need a radically different approach to address the delays.”

The guidance praises the approach of Care & Repair Cymru, which supports 13 Welsh care and repair agencies that carry out adaptations and operate a rapid-response service authorised to undertake minor works costing up to £350 and grant-funded without a means test.

More money is available for adaptations than ever before. With ministers now recognising their value in helping keep older and disabled people out of hospital and residential care, funding for disabled facilities grants, which pay for adaptations, has risen by 8% in England in 2019-20, to £505m. The aim is to make 85,000 grants this year, more than twice the number five years ago.

More than 2 million older people are suffering physical and mental ill health and even death as a consequence of living in substandard and non-accessible homes, according to a cross-party group of MPs.

Substandard housing costs the NHS £1.4bn every year with cold, damp and other hazards causing falls and exacerbating conditions such as heart disease, strokes, respiratory illnesses and arthritis as well as contributing to poor mental health, according to an in-depth inquiry by the all-party parliamentary group for ageing and older people.

“Many older people are living in unsafe, unsuitable and unhealthy accommodation with little hope of being able to move somewhere better or improve their homes,” said Rachael Maskell MP, chair of the group. “Unless we work to find tangible solutions, older people and some of the most vulnerable in society will continue to live in substandard and unsuitable accommodation, the implications of which could be devastating to their physical, mental and social wellbeing.”

The report into decent and accessible homes for older people comes after an in-depth inquiry over the last year into the link between health and housing, home ownership, supported housing, and the private rented sector.

The inquiry also predicted that the number of older people renting in the private sector would soar in the coming years – often in unsafe, unsuitable and unhealthy accommodation.

Currently households comprising people aged over 65 account for less than 10% of all those living in the private rented sector, but their numbers are reportedly rising fast: a recent survey by the National Landlords Association found that the numbers of retired people in the UK moving into the private rented sector had increased by 200,000 over the last four years.

Britain is facing a “pensioner” explosion with some areas forecast to see their numbers of elderly expand to up to 90 per cent of their adult populations.

Traditional coastal and rural towns and villages dominate the new “grey” hotspots ranging from West Somerset and West Dorset in the west of England, North Norfolk and Suffolk in the East and Scarborough, Fylde, Ryedale and South Lakeland in the North.

The number of men and women aged over 65 is expected to increase by 40 per cent by 2041 to more than 14 million, according to the Office for National Statistics (ONS).

The biggest rise will be among those aged over 90 where numbers will more than double from 500,000 to 1.2 million in two decades…

Elderly people have been driven out of British cities into the surrounding suburbs and villages more than in any other country in Europe, an official study shows.

An analysis of the populations of urban areas across the European Union shows that the UK has by far the biggest divide along age lines between cities and the neighbouring areas.

The figures, published by the Office for National Statistics as part of a major study of city life across the UK and Europe, follow warnings that British inner city areas are become virtual “no-go zones” for older people because of a lack of basic amenities as simple as public lavatories or park benches.

City centres have become described as virtual playgrounds for the young, who live, work and socialise in small areas of glass office blocks, executive apartments and chain bars.

The tendency for large traditional buildings being converted into smaller flats by landlords is also thought to be contributing to the movement of older people out of city centres.