Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will ask NHS England to set out the definition of ‘clinically urgent’ for patients who need to be dealt with on the same day in the context of the the GP contract 2026/27.

As part of the 2026/27 GP Contract, we are amending the core contract to explicitly require that requests identified as clinically urgent must be dealt with on the same day. It is for practices to use their clinical judgement to determine which requests are clinically urgent.