Recovering Access to Primary Care

Diana Johnson Excerpts

Tuesday 9th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

My hon. Friend is right about the opportunity that tech offers to deliver changes at scale and the fact that this is proven technology that is working and already up and running in many primary care settings. So often within the NHS the challenge is not the initial innovation—we get pockets of wonderful innovation—but how we industrialise it across the wider NHS. This recovery plan focuses on that, looking at how we scale the case studies to which he refers. About half of primary care does have digital telephony. The opportunity here is to target that funding at the other half; that is often the smaller GP practices, as well as those in coastal communities, because they find the transition to tech more difficult. That is why a key part of this recovery plan is about the investment in not just the tech, but in locums, to provide cover so that staff can make the transition to that new way of working.

[Dame Diana Johnson (Kingston upon Hull North) (Lab)]

The NHS workforce plan has been promised for years. Meanwhile, as my hon. Friend the Member for Kingston upon Hull West and Hessle (Emma Hardy) says, we are short of GPs, pharmacists and dentists in Hull. Will the Secretary of State answer the question she put to him: can we please build on the excellent work of the Hull York Medical School to set up a dental training school there, and a school of pharmacy and one for ophthalmologists? That would help in the longer term, but we need a proper workforce plan and the Government need to get on with it.

[Steve Barclay]

As I have said several times, we will publish a workforce plan shortly. We are committed to that and the Chancellor set that out in the autumn statement. Of course, when he was doing this job and when I was previously in the Department, we expanded medical undergraduate places by a fifth, so there was an increase then. I have said that we will also set out a dental recovery plan in due course.