Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps she is taking to support General Practices in rural areas.

Our Delivery Plan for Recovering Access to Primary Care outlines how we will support general practices (GPs), including in rural areas, by empowering patients to manage their own health, implementing the Modern General Practice Access model, expanding community pharmacy services, and cutting bureaucracy to reduce workload.

We acknowledge that some areas of the country are experiencing recruitment and retention issues with regard to National Health Service GPs, and we are taking steps to address this. In 2016, the Government launched the Targeted Enhanced Recruitment Scheme, which has attracted hundreds of doctors to train in hard to recruit locations, including many rural areas, by providing a one-off financial incentive of £20,000.