Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the potential effect of the expansion of the Doctaly scheme on patients' access to GP services.

The Department has made no assessment of the potential effect of the expansion of the Doctaly scheme on patients’ access to general practice (GP) services.

The General Practice Forward View, published in April 2016, announced that an extra £2.4 billion a year will be invested in GP services by 2020/21. As part of overall investment 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 GP 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.