General Practitioners: Telemedicine
(asked on 3rd July 2026) - View Source
Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the potential impact of increased use of online consultation systems on total demand for GP services; and whether additional funding has been provided to practices to meet any increase in workload arising from that demand.
The Government is committed to improving access to general practices (GPs) by increasing capacity and making it easier for patients to contact their surgery. The changes made to online consultation systems in October 2024 are supporting greater parity across booking routes, reducing pressure on busy phone lines, and ensuring patients have a consistent and reliable way to request care.
The Office for National Statistics’ Health Insight Survey for May 2026 shows that 76.5% of patients reported it was easy to contact their GP, up from 60.9% in July 2024, an increase of nearly 16%
To support practices, we are investing an additional £601 million in GPs in 2026/27, bringing total spend on the GP Contract to approximately £14 billion. This builds on the £1.1 billion increase in 2025/26, the largest uplift in over a decade. Since October 2024 we have recruited 2,000 more GPs. We now have the highest number of GPs by headcount since 2015. The 2026/27 contract also introduces a practice-level GP reimbursement scheme, backed by £292 million, to help practices recruit more GPs or expand sessions
Data collected through General Practice Appointment Data provides insight into the volume of online consultation submissions received by practices. In May 2026, practices received 2.1 million more online consultation submissions than in May 2025, a 36.4% year-on-year increase. However, submissions were 7.2% lower than in April 2026, following a larger month-on-month decrease in April of 14.6%, equivalent to 1.5 million fewer submissions.
As a result, GPs have delivered 12.7 million additional appointments to patients compared with the previous year. This data is available at the following link: