General Practitioners: Standards

(asked on 3rd February 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, pursuant to the Answer of 27 January 2021 to Question 140237 on General Practitioners, what recent steps he has taken to support GPs to reduce appointment waiting times.


Answered by
Jo Churchill Portrait
Jo Churchill
Minister of State (Department for Work and Pensions)
This question was answered on 24th February 2021

We will create an extra 50 million appointments in general practice a year and increase the workforce by 6,000 more doctors and 26,000 more primary care professionals, such as physiotherapists, social prescribers and pharmacists. NHS England and NHS Improvement and Health Education England are working together with the profession to boost recruitment, address the reasons why doctors leave the profession and encourage them to return to practice.

This will mean bigger teams of staff providing a wider range of care options for patients and will free up more time for doctors to focus on those with more complex needs. Appointment numbers have risen from 16.6 million in April 2020 to 24 million in December 2020.

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