Asked by: Leigh Ingham (Labour - Stafford)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the potential impact of changes to (a) funding and (b) National Insurance contributions at the Autumn Budget 2024 on hospices.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
The Department of Health and Social Care has indicated that it will not be possible to answer this question within the usual time period. An answer is being prepared and will be provided as soon as it is available.
Asked by: Edward Morello (Liberal Democrat - West Dorset)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he has plans to provide additional support to ensure primary healthcare remains accessible in isolated regions.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
We acknowledge the urgent challenge of ensuring that rural areas, including West Dorset, have the resources to continue serving their patients. To address this, we will increase capacity in general practices (GPs) and ensure that rural areas have the necessary workforce to provide integrated, patient-centred services.
We are committed to training thousands more GPs across the country, including in rural areas. We have also committed to recruiting over 1,000 newly qualified GPs through an £82 million boost to the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme, which will increase the number of appointments delivered in GPs. This will increase capacity, secure the future pipeline of GPs, and alleviate the pressure on those currently working in the system.
We are tackling the challenges that people in rural areas face when accessing National Health Service dental care. Work is underway to deliver our rescue plan to provide 700,000 more urgent dental appointments, and to recruit new dentists to the areas that need them most. The Golden Hello scheme will see up to 240 dentists receiving payments of £20,000 to work in those areas that need them most, for three years. To rebuild dentistry in the long term, we will reform the dental contract with the sector, with a focus on prevention and the retention of NHS dentists.
Local authorities are required to undertake a pharmaceutical needs assessment every three years to assess whether their population is adequately served, and they must keep these assessments under review. These assessments inform integrated care boards when reviewing applications for NHS pharmacies. The Pharmacy Access Scheme provides additional funding to pharmacies in areas where there are fewer pharmacies. In rural areas where there is no pharmacy, GPs are permitted to dispense medicines. Patients can also choose to access medicines and pharmacy services through any of the nearly 400 NHS online pharmacies that are contractually required to deliver prescription medicines free of charge to patients.
Asked by: Monica Harding (Liberal Democrat - Esher and Walton)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the average per-patient funding for GP practices was in (a) England and (b) NHS Surrey Heartlands in 2023-4.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
This data is published annually by NHS England in the NHS Payments to General Practice Report and will be available in due course.
Asked by: Monica Harding (Liberal Democrat - Esher and Walton)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what the average GP practice patient list is; what the largest patient list was at a GP practice in 2023-4; and what assessment his Department has made of the potential impact of GP list sizes on patient (a) experience and (b) outcomes.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
Data on patients registered at a general practice (GP) is published on a monthly basis, and is as follows for 2023/24: at the beginning of 2023/24, 1 April 2023, the largest practice had 106,308 patients, and the median average practice had 8,383 patients; and at the end of 2023/24, 1 April 2024, the largest practice had 98,469 patients, and the median average practice had 8,620 patients.
NHS England has overall responsibility for ensuring that there are sufficient primary medical services to meet the reasonable requirements of patients throughout the country. To do so, they will contract providers, such as GPs, to provide these services. GPs are required to provide services to meet the reasonable needs of the patients registered at their practice. This includes making their own workforce plans, and so there is no Government recommendation for how many patients a GP should have assigned.
We expect commissioners to act if services are not meeting the reasonable needs of their patients. Under GP Contract regulations, practices can apply to their commissioner to close their patient list to new registrations for a period of time for a number of reasons, including workload and staffing considerations.
This data is taken from the Patients Registered at a GP Practice data set, from NHS England Digital. It should be noted that practices can operate across multiple sites or use a digital first approach, which can account for a particularly large patient list. Further information on the data set is available at the following link:
Asked by: John Hayes (Conservative - South Holland and The Deepings)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the impact of the increase in employers’ National Insurance contributions on hospices.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
We have taken necessary decisions to fix the foundations in the public finances at the Autumn Budget, which enabled the Spending Review settlement of a £22.6 billion increase in resource spending for the Department from 2023/24 outturn to 2025/26. The employer National Insurance contributions rise will be implemented in April 2025, and the Department will set out further details on the allocation of funding for next year in due course.
Asked by: Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Labour - Slough)
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent steps he has taken to reduce the waiting time for ADHD assessments.
Answered by Stephen Kinnock - Minister of State (Department of Health and Social Care)
It is the responsibility of integrated care boards to make appropriate provision to meet the health and care needs of their local population, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) assessments, in line with relevant National Institute for Health and Care Excellence guidelines.
We are supporting a taskforce that NHS England is establishing to look at ADHD service provision and its impact on patient experience. The taskforce will bring together expertise from across a broad range of sectors, including the National Health Service, education, and justice, to better understand the challenges affecting people with ADHD, and to help provide a joined-up approach in response to concerns around rising demand.
Alongside the work of the taskforce, NHS England will continue to develop a national ADHD data improvement plan, carry out more detailed work to understand the provider and commissioning landscape, and capture examples from local health systems which are trialling innovative ways of delivering ADHD services to ensure best practice is captured and shared across the system.