Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what support the Government is providing to GPs to help them with the cost of insuring work carried out outside normal hours.

The Department and NHS England are working on proposals for discussion with the profession, medical defence organisations, the commercial insurance industry and the NHS Litigation Authority.

This will consider:

― how personal costs of indemnity and clinical insurance can be contained - provided certain clinical governance standards are met, with the objective of reducing the overall costs to the individual;

― the funding routes for indemnity in different models of care; and

― with a specific focus on new models of care such as Primary and Acute Community Services and Multi-Speciality Community Providers and the scope for corporate indemnity, freeing up individuals working in those new models from the burden of personal indemnity costs.

NHS England created the Winter Indemnity Scheme which ran from December 2015 until March 2016, making £2 million available to cover the cost of additional indemnity premiums for doctors to undertake additional out of hours sessions. This was in response to increased demand for appointments during the winter period.