Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what plans his Department has to improve patient access to GP appointments.

We recognise that despite the hard work of general practice (GP) teams, some patients are still struggling to access care in a timely way. That is why we have published our Delivery Plan for Recovering Access to Primary Care. The plan has two central ambitions: to tackle the 8am rush and reduce the number of people struggling to contact their practice, and for patients to know on the day they contact their practice how their request will be managed.

We will achieve this by rolling out new digital tools and telephone systems which can help practices to better match their capacity to patient demand, backed by £240 million in retargeted funding. The plan also includes further measures to empower patients to do more themselves, cut bureaucracy for GPs and build capacity to deliver more appointments; and we are investing at least £1.5 billion to create an additional 50 million general practice appointments by 2024 by increasing and diversifying the workforce.