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 the effect of the availability of GP appointments on rates of vaccination in England.
Access to general practitioner (GP) appointments is key to good vaccination uptake and coverage. The NHS Long Term Plan published in January 2019 committed to improve access to primary care through a range of initiatives including more healthcare staff working in and with GP practices where many patients receive their vaccinations. As part of this work, there has been a national review of access to general practice services that commenced in July 2019 and will complete in 2020, which has already informed contract discussions for 2020/21. The results of these discussions were published in February 2020 as part of the updated GP contract deal for 2020/21 which can be found at the following link:
https://www.england.nhs.uk/gp/investment/gp-contract/
One of these actions relates to developing a nationally consistent extended access offer reflecting what works best in existing local schemes.