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 ensure the NHS has access to faster digital technology systems to enable practices to be run more efficiently.

We are committed to ensuring that all practices have access to faster digital technology systems to enable to high quality, effective healthcare services that are responsive to all patients’ needs.

We have rolled out National Health Service WiFi across 96.8% of general practitioner (GP) practices, benefiting the care of an estimated 57.8 million patients. The new Health and Social Care Network (HSCN) arrangements are enabling clinical commissioning groups (CCGs) to obtain faster data network connections for GPs and all GP practices are expected to have migrated from their legacy connectivity to new HSCN services by the end of 2020.

The fourth edition of the GP IT Operating Model requires CCGs to adopt appropriately-sized HSCN connectivity capable of supporting their current and future GP business needs and states they should upgrade any existing copper-based asymmetric digital subscriber line (ADSL) connections providing primary connectivity to practice premises to fibre-based connections such as Fibre to the Cabinet (FTTC) or Fibre to the Premise (FTTP) as a minimum.