Lord Turnberg
Main Page: Lord Turnberg (Labour - Life peer)
Baroness Manzoor
I thank my noble friend; as he says, there is a challenge. For the record, since everyone around the House, quite rightly, has praised my noble friend Lord O’Shaughnessy, I am not his replacement; I am standing in for him.
It is an interesting question; we know that publishing this document alone will not translate all the plans and objectives into reality. As I have already said, that is why we have asked the NHS to develop a clear implementation framework by April, to set out the commitments that should be delivered by local systems to ensure that there is transparency for patients and the public. This is not something that has come out of the ether from nowhere; we are building on success. It is not a radically different plan; we are picking out the best of what we need to achieve. The plan builds on what has been achieved in recent years and the learning from previous reform programmes. It has already benefited from widespread engagement during its development, working with organisations that represent over 3.5 million people to ensure that its vision and aims are the right ones.
Lord Turnberg (Lab)
My Lords, I bow to no one in my admiration of the NHS, having worked in it for many years—and of course I have, with the merry band of admirers, strong admiration for the noble Lord, Lord O’Shaughnessy. The document is extremely strong on aspiration and it identifies many of the problems but, as always, the big problem is implementation: how it is carried out, and whether we will achieve it. As always, implementation is dependent on the workforce.
I was going to ask about what we are doing in public health but that has been asked already, so I will ask about general practice. The Government have made many valiant attempts to improve general practice, but the fact is that general practitioners are unhappy, dissatisfied and under a lot of stress. Many are retiring early; many are not able to get recruits into their practices to succeed those who are leaving. Can the Minister explain what is happening to a friend of mine, who is a general practitioner and tearing her hair out because she cannot get a successor to a partner who has left? She is increasing her workload and is on so many committees that she can hardly spare the time to go to her clinical practice. General practice is in a sorry state. If we cannot improve it, none of this can happen.
Baroness Manzoor
The noble Lord is absolutely right that implementation is key. We can have great aspirations, but we must have a proper plan in place to ensure that we can deliver. The implementation plan that I have spoken about previously will flesh this out in much greater detail so that we can look at what the IT systems will be, what the genomics will be, what clinical issues we want to tackle and what performance areas we want to highlight. On primary care, I have already indicated the amount of money that we are putting in place for preventative measures. GPs are the gatekeepers to secondary care, so it is important that we have a healthy and viable workforce in primary care.
Primary care is of course very important. We are committed to delivering 5,000 more GPs; we recognise that this might take longer than we had hoped, but there has been a bit of improvement in the numbers from last year to this year. NHSE and HEE have a number of schemes in place: to recruit more GPs, including increasing the number of doctors entering GP training; to boost retention through the GP retention scheme and the GP retention fund; and to support doctors through the GP Health Service and the releasing time for care programme. Last year, to put it in perspective, we recruited 3,473 GP trainees against a target of 3,250. That was a 10% increase on 2017, but I recognise that we need to do better.