Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, with reference to her Department's press release of 9 November entitled £40 million for GPs to keep vulnerable patients out of hospital this winter, whether the £40 million referred to is additional to the funding which would normally be made available through the GP contract.

The £40 million of funding for the GP Winter Proactive Care Programme has been repurposed and targeted at the most vulnerable patients after efficiency and validation checks were conducted against existing general practice (GP) lists to ensure that, where patients have moved out of an area, practices are no longer being paid on the capitation basis for those individuals. Maintaining accurate patient lists ensures practices are funded for the patients they actually care for. We have been successful in providing digital services for patients to tell us they are still at their registered address, to reduce load on GPs. 40% to 43% of confirmations in the last three months have come from patients, up from 10% to 15%. Safeguards are in place and no patient will be removed from a list on the basis of not replying to a single piece of correspondence.