Access to Primary Healthcare

Al Pinkerton Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Dr Al Pinkerton (Surrey Heath) (LD)]

For my constituents in Surrey Heath, access to primary care—whether GPs, dentists, pharmacies or optometrists—has increasingly become a postcode lottery. Vast dentistry deserts—maybe not of Saharan scale—have opened up across Surrey Heath, with residents simply unable to find an NHS dentist with an open list for them or their families. When a list does open up, it almost immediately closes again due to the overwhelming demand. Today, families are being forced to seek private provision for their dental care—if they are able to stretch their finances that far—or they simply forgo dental care altogether. During the recent election, I even met a constituent who had resorted to an amateur tooth extraction because of the lack of affordable dental treatment locally.

The postcode lottery extends to GP services too, although the issue of access takes on a slightly different form. Surrey Heath has some excellent and much-loved GP practices that are working hard to put the experiences of users first, but others have booking systems, triage mechanisms and approaches to communication that leave patients feeling anxious and frustrated.

I pay particular tribute to the surgery in Lightwater, a village in my constituency. Residents regale me routinely with stories about the fast, efficient and friendly telephone service it provides, the availability of on-the-day appointments and the generally high quality of the service. It is little wonder that residents from miles beyond Lightwater are so desperate to move their registration to that particular well-run surgery.

Some other surgeries, however, are not so highly praised. They are criticised for their impersonal online booking systems and inappropriately long waiting times for appointments, sometimes requiring patients to wait a month or so to see a GP. This is not just poor practice; it has real-life implications for the health outcomes of patients and for the economy, as residents take longer to be seen, longer to be treated, longer to recover, and longer to get back to work than if they had been seen earlier. Online booking systems risk creating a digital barrier to entry for our most vulnerable residents. It cannot be right that those requiring healthcare might be dissuaded from seeking it because of the complexity of approaching their GP, or because they do not have, cannot afford or cannot operate the technologies required to book an appointment.

Our local pharmacies, too, are under huge strain, and I commend the incredible local independent pharmacies who look after communities across Surrey Heath so well. I am incredibly pleased that we are having this debate today, not only to talk about the challenges of primary healthcare but to highlight some of the great practice that we can see within our communities. We need to support our local pharmacies, which deliver so much care and support, and we need, as the Liberal Democrat manifesto proposed, to enshrine the commitment that patients can see a GP within seven days—a commitment underpinned by an associated commitment to train and recruit thousands of GPs every year.