Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to reduce the number of patients waiting at least three weeks to see a GP.

The Government has committed to ensuring everyone across the country has easier and more convenient access to general practice services, including appointments in the evenings and weekends.

The latest National Health Service planning guidance, issued by NHS England in February 2018, brought forward the deadline for clinical commissioning groups to provide extended access to general practice services to 1 October 2018, to ensure additional capacity is in place ahead of winter 2018. This includes ensuring that access is available during peak times of demand, including bank holidays and across the Easter, Christmas and New Year periods.

NHS England and Health Education England (HEE) are working together with the profession to increase the general practitioner (GP) workforce. This includes measures to boost recruitment, address the reasons why GPs are leaving the profession, and encourage GPs to return to practice.

The number of doctors entering GP speciality training has been increasing year on year, this year HEE recruited the highest number of GP trainees ever - 3,473 GP trainees against a target of 3,250, a 10% increase on last year.

Greater skill mix is also key to releasing capacity in general practice, we have committed to investment in the multidisciplinary workforce in general practice. As of June 2018, there were

over 3,300 additional clinical staff, excluding GPs, working in general practice since 2015; consisting of over 500 more nurses and 2,800 more other direct patient care.