Access to Primary Healthcare

Claire Young Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

Given the time constraint, I will skip some examples, such as Thornbury health centre and Three Shires medical practice, which are already safely lodged in the Secretary of State’s inbox. Instead, I want to focus on the inter- dependence in the primary care system—an ecosystem in which strains in one part have knock-on effects in others—and to illustrate that with an example from my constituency.

This summer, I met a community pharmacist in Abbotswood, an area with significant health inequalities. He raised the same concerns about the flawed funding formula for pharmacies that we have heard today, but he has an additional challenge: the next-door GP surgery, with which his pharmacy has had a symbiotic relationship for many years, has been incorporated into a larger group. The other surgeries are in another urban area some miles away and difficult to access by public transport, and the local surgery now offers patients only limited hours. Understandably, many of them are switching to surgeries in central Yate, which has an impact not only on the viability of that local GP surgery but on the community pharmacy, which is missing out on the Pharmacy First referrals that it might have expected. Also, once people have travelled into town, generally they will use the pharmacies there. If that pharmacy is unable to continue, people will miss out on its many valuable preventive services: monitoring medications, providing services to those with diabetes and administering vaccinations. That will increase pressure on GPs and our hospitals.

The pharmacist also commented on the impact of the dental desert in my area, as in others around the country. People cannot access NHS dentistry, which leads to other health issues not being picked up. I want to stress that the Government cannot fix just one part of the system—they have to look at the system as a whole. That is what the Liberal Democrats recognised in our manifesto. I urge the Government to look at our plan for the NHS and work constructively with us to fix all aspects of primary care.