Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what recent assessment he has made of the adequacy of current (a) healthcare professional staffing levels and (b) resources to achieve a seven-day NHS.

We have provided the National Health Service in England with £10 billion in real terms additional funding by 2020-21. This fully funds the NHS’s Five Year Forward View, including delivery of seven day services in hospitals. These are urgent and emergency care, non-elective hospital services which are of the same high quality at the weekend as during the week.

It will be for local commissioners and providers to decide how to organise their services to meet the standards for seven day services in hospitals. The Government is not imposing a “one size fits all” model. At a national level, the Department is working with NHS England, NHS Improvement and Health Education England to produce a summary of the workforce implications of implementing the four priority clinical standards for urgent and emergency care services in hospitals, which it will publish by the end of the calendar year.

The Government has committed to increasing the primary and community care workforce by 10,000 by 2020, including an additional 5,000 doctors in general practice. NHS England will provide over £500 million of recurrent funding by 2020-21, on top of current primary medical care allocations, to enable clinical commissioning groups to commission and fund extra capacity across England. This is to ensure that by 2020 everyone has access to general practitioner services, including sufficient routine appointments at evenings and weekends to meet locally determined demand, alongside effective access to out of hours and urgent care services.