NHS: GP Clinics Debate
Full Debate: Read Full DebateLord Brooke of Alverthorpe
Main Page: Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe (Labour - Life peer)Department Debates - View all Lord Brooke of Alverthorpe's debates with the Department of Health and Social Care
(9 years, 5 months ago)
Lords Chamber
To ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they will provide an annual report to Parliament regarding the operation of seven-day opening of general practitioner clinics.
My Lords, we are committed to seven-day GP access. We have already invested £175 million in 57 schemes covering 2,500 practices, offering improved access including evening and weekend appointments. The 2016-17 mandate to NHS England, to be published later this year, is expected to reflect Government commitments, including on access. The Government hold NHS England to account for progress against these objectives and publish an annual assessment of NHS England, including progress in delivering the mandate.
My Lords, I am grateful to the Minister for the information he has just given. Will he recall that earlier in the week, in reply to a Question about the number of GPs in practices, he said that the general practice model “is largely broken”? His second statement was that it “is probably broken”. In the light of that expression of his concerns about what was happening in GP practices, I presume that he was associating himself with those millions of NHS patients who increasingly find it difficult to see a GP within the time they want, or to see a GP of their choice. If so, can he say whether moving from what is broadly a five and a half-day weekly GP practice to seven days for all will improve matters for those patients or make matters worse, especially as it is being done on a broken model, to use his own words? In those circumstances—
In those circumstances will he say what the new model will be, spell it out to the public and say how many GP practices will have to close?
The noble Lord makes a number of interesting points. One of the leaders of the BMA talked yesterday about the need for a renaissance in general practice, which was about the only thing in that speech that I agreed with. We need a renaissance and a complete transformation in general practice because the structure of primary care is largely unchanged since being set up in 1947, and the population’s requirements have changed fundamentally. So over the next five years, I expect primary care to go through a renaissance and be transformed from the bottom up.