Emergency Hospital Admissions

Lord Rennard Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

I agree with the noble Lord about funding. The Government have now made £9.4 billion of extra funding available to local authorities over three years, including in the most recent local government funding settlement. The noble Lord makes a good point about bed capacity: it had shown a downward trend for a long time before stabilising in recent years. I point to two successes this winter. The first is the improvement in delayed transfers of care—we have really started to get some traction on that. The second is about £60 million, I believe, of funding that went into providing extra bed capacity over winter. Occupancy levels are too high. The NHS is getting better at managing it more efficiently, but we certainly need to do better.

[Lord Rennard (LD)]

My Lords, does the Minister accept that part of the problem with emergency hospital admissions is the difficulty people have in accessing their GPs? Some of this is perhaps because of the high levels of stress among GPs, but there is also recent evidence suggesting that it is because of the £1 million pension cap imposed on GPs, which means many more of them are retiring before the age of 60. Surely, in the interests of the NHS, this particular cap should be looked at again.

[Lord O’Shaughnessy]

Although the number of early GP retirements has been rising, the number of total GP retirements has been falling, which is encouraging. It is also important to point out that, while the pension cap obviously applies to everybody, it has not had the impact that the noble Lord described on dentists or consultants, so there is something more to it. It is to do with how GP services are structured and providing support for that partnership model. That is what we are trying to do at the moment.