NHS: Out of Hours Service

Lord Ribeiro Excerpts

Tuesday 26th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Earl Howe]

My Lords, of course, the results from the Patients Association report are a matter for concern. We are absolutely committed to improving access to GPs and, from 1 April, responsibility for making sure that that happens will pass to the NHS Commissioning Board. We have outlined a clear set of objectives around patients’ experience of local primary care services in the mandate to the board; we have launched marketing campaigns in each of the new NHS 111 areas, which we are confident will facilitate better access to out-of-hours care; and we will publish information regularly, so that patients can see how their practice is performing and feed back to their practice when it is not performing.

[Lord Ribeiro]

My Lords, at a time when nurses are being urged to wash their patients, is it not time that the GP contract was renegotiated so that GPs can be responsible for the out-of-hours care of their patients and, in doing so, perhaps relieve the pressure on our A&E departments?

[Earl Howe]

Increasingly, this is likely to happen, because our changes to the GP contract this year are bound to make sure that GPs think more about long-term integrated care for their patients. The recommendations from NICE underpinned the new arrangements in the GP contract, and my noble friend is absolutely right that that has to remain very squarely in the sights of all GPs.