GP Appointment Availability

Debate between Maria Caulfield and Chris Green

Tuesday 26th October 2021 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Maria Caulfield)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Robertson. I thank the hon. Member for Beaconsfield (Joy Morrissey) for bringing forward the debate. As we have heard from MPs from across the political parties, their postbags show that this is a big issue from the perspective both of constituents, who are trying to access appointments, and of GPs, who are reaching out to their local MPs to highlight the pressures and difficulties that they have faced recently.

I want to start off by thanking general practice teams and GPs in particular. It is disappointing to hear what the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for Tooting (Dr Allin-Khan), had to say. There is no war on GPs. We are all in this together, including GPs, reception staff and nurses. On 14 October the Secretary of State announced a GP support package precisely to support GPs in supporting their patients. We have been listening long and hard to the difficulties faced in primary care. The range of measures I will talk about are there to help GPs as much as patients. If we do not support GPs, the patients will struggle.

I wish to put on the record my thanks to all in general practice during the pandemic. They have gone above and beyond—and often under the radar—by continuing to see patients during the crisis. They have also helped support and in many cases run vaccination programmes in their local areas, and have been a key factor in supporting community teams to help patients be discharged from hospital more quickly and to prevent readmission. That was key during the crisis. Without their hard work and dedication, much of that would not have happened.

There is, however, an issue. We all know that there are problems with accessing GP appointments, but there is also some good news. My hon. Friend the Member for Barrow and Furness (Simon Fell) described the situation perfectly when he called it a perfect storm. So many patients did not come forward during the pandemic, as advised in the main, and many issues, symptoms, conditions and worries are now coming to the fore. The pent-up demand is such that GPs are overwhelmed by the number of people who now need to be seen, often with symptoms and conditions that are far worse than if they had been able to come forward at an earlier stage.

The physical set-up of many GP practices—infection control measures had to be put in place to protect GPs and their staff and patients—means that they have struggled to see patients. My hon. Friend the Member for Bracknell (James Sunderland) asked about those measures. They have been relaxed: social distancing has been reduced from 2 metres to 1 metre. Face masks are still required, but it is now safer for GPs to open their doors and get more patients into their waiting and consulting rooms. Some infection control measures have been relaxed and we should see an improvement.

Appointment numbers are returning to pre-pandemic levels. In August the average number of general practice appointments per working day was 1.14 million, which represented a 2.2% increase on August 2019. As GPs will tell us, they are seeing more patients. The proportion of face-to-face appointments is also increasing. Since August, nearly 60% of appointments have been face to face. That shows that things are starting to return to pre-pandemic levels, but the sheer scale of people who now need to be seen means that it often does not feel like that for patients.

I will give my hon. Friend the Member for Beaconsfield some specific figures for Buckinghamshire. In August, practices arranged a total of more than 200,000 appointments with patients, which is an increase of more than 3,000 from August 2019. In addition, practices in Buckinghamshire helped deliver more than 786,000 vaccines. I take her point that there are specific issues with certain practices that are struggling. My advice to her—and I am happy to meet her and discuss this more fully—is to try to broker a meeting between the GPs and the clinical commissioning group, because often additional support can be given locally to those practices that are really struggling. Sometimes GPs are so overwhelmed that they do not have the space to ask for help and support, even though that is what they need.

Many colleagues, including my hon. Friends the Members for Bolton West (Chris Green), for Beaconsfield and for Barrow and Furness, have raised the issue of telephone access. Much of the problem that patients face is that they cannot get through in the first place, whether that is to make a face-to-face appointment, have a telephone consultation or make a virtual appointment. That is an issue. GPs have historically devised their own telephone systems. They may have gone in with primary care networks or the CCG, and many have their own set-up. Given the sheer scale of the numbers, there is a real issue in having two or three receptionists tackle 300 or 400 calls on a Monday morning, most of which will be complex calls rather than quick, five-minute calls to book an appointment.

That is why part of the GP support package that the Secretary of State announced on 14 October will provide telephone support through a cloud-based system, which will do a number of things. First, it will increase capacity so that patients can get through much quicker. Secondly, it will provide an automated queuing system. I know from my own constituency that patients can be 29th in the queue and have to wait for a long time, so providing that extra capacity will take the pressure off GPs. It will also provide an insight into how much admin support GPs actually need. That valuable data will allow us to provide them with support for the long term.

There are a number of other measures in the GP support package and we are working hard on this matter. There is a £250 million winter access package, aimed at helping GPs open up their surgeries for more face-to-face appointments because this is not an either/or situation. Many Members, including the hon. Member for Batley and Spen (Kim Leadbeater), pointed out that many patients like telephone consultations and the virtual appointments, and we are not going back to pre-pandemic face-to-face-only appointments. We need to embrace the changes that technology has brought. It is far more beneficial for busy people who are working or juggling childcare to be able to speak to a GP rather than have to trundle down to the surgery, but there is a place for face-to-face appointments as well.

The access package of £250 million can be used in a number of ways by GP practices. It can be used to take on locum staff if they are available, to take on other healthcare professionals to see patients, to extend opening times, or even to change the layout of a surgery so that it can accommodate more patients. It is for local commissioners and GPs to decide how they would like to use that fund.

There are also significant moves to reduce bureaucracy for GPs. They are often the only people who can sign fit notes or Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency requests. As has been said, there are other healthcare professionals who are equally qualified to do that. Some of it may need legislative changes, which we are working at pace to introduce, but we want to take that bureaucratic burden off GPs so that they are free to see patients when they need to.

There are also a number of other measures in terms of increasing the general practice workforce. As the hon. Member for Barrow and Furness said, communications is a crucial point because it is not always the GP that patients will see in face-to-face appointments. They might see a nurse, a pharmacist or a physio. We need to get that message out at a general practice level, but also at a national level.

[Chris Green]

On compulsory vaccinations in the care sector, I have concerns about compulsory vaccination on the NHS sector. Would the Minister do what she can to ensure that there is an impact assessment before this is done on the NHS, if it is done in the future?

[Maria Caulfield]

My hon. Friend is certainly persistent in his questioning on that issue. It is a decision for the Secretary of State, who is looking at such factors. The vast majority of NHS staff have been vaccinated, for their own protection as much as anything else. I want to highlight that we are increasing the number of primary healthcare professionals across the board, aiming to replicate the model used in hospitals, where a consultant leads a team of multi-disciplinary professionals who will help see a patient and are, sometimes, more expert in dealing with certain clinical situation than GPs themselves.