Recovering Access to Primary Care

Matt Warman Excerpts

Tuesday 9th May 2023 Commons Chamber

[Steve Barclay]

I join the hon. Lady—as I did the other colleagues from across the House who have done this—in paying tribute to the primary care staff in her constituency for the work they do. We have touched a number of times on the fact that there are both more pharmacies and more pharmacists than there were in 2010, so there is more capacity. However, we also recognise the scope to better use the expertise within pharmacy, which is why an additional £645 million of investment—new funding—is going into pharmacies over the next two years.

[Matt Warman (Boston and Skegness) (Con)]

I am married to a trainee GP, so I have read all 46 pages of this excellent plan—reading it makes me different from those on the Opposition Front Bench. Importantly, the plan is littered with examples of brilliant practice up and down the country, with case studies that should be adopted more widely. Almost all of them come back to the use of technology. Will the Secretary of State say that he will target the help needed to adopt that technology at the practices that need it most, which are so often those in coastal constituencies such as mine?

[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.