Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he plans to enable the provision of additional services in general practice clinics to reduce the workload in accident and emergency departments.

The Government has committed to improving access to general practice services by March 2019. This includes ensuring there are sufficient routine appointments available at evenings and weekends to meet locally determined demand, alongside effective access to out of hours and urgent care services. This will help to reduce pressures on general practice and the wider system, including accident and emergency attendances. Millions of patients have already benefitted from improved access to general practice services.

Expanded/extended access to general practice is one of the key elements of NHS England’s Urgent and Emergency Care (UEC) review. As set out in the Next Steps on the NHS Five Year Forward View, the aim of the UEC review is to make access to urgent and emergency services clearer for patients and to remove the mix of walk-in centres, minor injury units and urgent care centres, in addition to the numerous general practitioner health services and surgeries offering varied levels of core and extended services. To address this, new urgent treatment centres which are community and primary care facilities providing access to urgent treatment for a local population, are being introduced which will standardise this range of options and simplify the system so patients know where to go and have clarity of which services are on offer. NHS England has set out a core set of standards for urgent treatment centres to establish as much commonality as possible.

To support improvements in patient care and access, and facilitate new ways of delivering primary care, investment in general practice has increased by £2.4 billion a year by 2020/2021 from £9.7 billion in 2015/16 to over £12 billion by 2020/21 – a 14% real-terms increase.