Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent assessment he has made of trends in the level of GP appointment waiting times in Oxford.

The proportion of general practitioner (GP) appointments by date and time between booking date and appointment date in Oxford Clinical Commissioning Group for the months November 2017 to December 2018 is presented in the attached table. The data on GP appointments are from a new data collection and are still experimental i.e. the data and collection method are still being refined and improved. NHS Digital’s data on ‘time from booking to appointment’ does not take into consideration that many patients will be appropriately booking ahead as part of the continuity of care they receive for long-term conditions. Other factors that drive the time from a booking to an appointment include appointment availability at the practice, patient availability, the urgency of the appointment and GP advice.