Access to Primary Healthcare

John Milne Excerpts

Wednesday 16th October 2024 Commons Chamber

[John Milne (Horsham) (LD)]

The ongoing crisis in GP access is as acute in my constituency as elsewhere. That is not simply because there are more patients, but because today’s patients have greater health challenges and need to see their GP more frequently. That is why simple comparisons with GP ratios from the past do not work. We need a health service capable of meeting today’s needs, not those of 20 years ago.

In Horsham, it has become routine for surgeries to fill all available appointments within minutes of opening. Relatively junior staff are obliged to spend the rest of their time saying no to frustrated, anxious and—not infrequently—angry patients. The danger is that we might enter a spiral of decline whereby demoralised staff leave, piling more pressure on to those who remain and scaring off replacements before they have ever had a chance to settle. We must get working conditions right, and that cannot be achieved in a state of permanent understaffing.

We must also get more from the services that we already have. Unleashing market forces on the NHS, and setting pharmacies, GPs and hospitals against each other, was a mistake. Effectively, they are in commercial competition to provide more of the treatments that pay well and less of those that do not. Only integrated care boards are in a position to take a holistic view of patient provision, but that is not really happening yet.

There are any number of alarming statistics relating to our health service, but I will conclude on one that is a bit more positive. As mentioned by one of my colleagues earlier, studies by the University of Cambridge and others suggest that where patients are seen by the same GP over 15 years, the average mortality rate declines by 25%. That is a remarkable level of improvement, more than could be expected from almost any other intervention. Let us give GPs the space to do their job properly, and let us support this motion.