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 help improve patient access to primary care services.

Our Delivery plan for recovering access to primary care has two central ambitions to improve access to general practice (GP): tackling the 8:00am rush and reducing the number of people struggling to contact their practice; and for patients to know on the day they contact their practice, how their request will be managed.

We are doing this by modernising telephone systems, backed by £240 million in retargeted funding, and by building the capacity to deliver more appointments. As a result, we have now delivered on our manifesto commitment for 50 million more GP appointments per year, with 370.7 million booked across the last 12 months.

There is an increasing number of clinical services that are being delivered in community pharmacy, including the New Medicines Service, Contraception Service, Blood Pressure Check Service, Stop Smoking Service, and most recently the new Pharmacy First service. These services help take the pressure off GPs, and make it quicker and easier for patients to access care.

Furthermore, our plan to recover and reform NHS dentistry will fund approximately 2.5 million additional appointments. The plan sets out our actions to address the challenges facing National Health Service dentistry, and to improve dental access for patients across the country. A new patient premium is supporting dentists to take on new patients, and a new marketing campaign will help everyone who needs an NHS dentist in finding one. We have further supported dentists by raising the minimum Units of Dental Activity rate to £28 this year, making NHS work more attractive and sustainable.