Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many people in each profession will constitute the 20,000 additional staff guaranteed to Primary Care Networks by 2023-24; and what criteria his Department uses to calculating the demand for those posts.

The new GP contract framework, published on 31 January 2019, set out plans for an ‘Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme’ in Primary Care Networks. This will provide guaranteed funding for up to an estimated 20,000 additional staff by 2023/24 and will fund new roles for which there is both credible supply and demand. The funding available will be phased and will meet a recurrent 70% of costs for additional clinical pharmacists, physician associates, first contact physiotherapists and first contact community paramedics; and 100% of the costs of additional social prescribing link workers. The actual distribution of the workforce increase across these five roles will depend on the choices that individual networks make, working with their system partners, and taking in to account their existing workforce.

From 2020/21, each network will be allotted a single combined maximum reimbursement sum, covering all five staff roles, offering Primary Care Networks flexibility to decide how many of each of the reimbursable staff they wish to engage, within their Additional Roles Sum.