Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps he is taking to improve access to (a) GP services and (b) dentistry services in Portsmouth South constituency.

We recognise that despite the hard work of general practice 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 improve access, both nationwide and in Portsmouth South: 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 modernising telephone systems which can help practices to better match their capacity to patient demand, backed by £240 million in retargeted funding. All practices have now signed up to transition to new digital systems. The plan will empower patients to do more themselves, cutting bureaucracy for general practitioners and building capacity to deliver more appointments. 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.

In July 2022 we announced a package of reforms to improve access to National Health Service dentistry, which outlined the steps we are taking to meet oral health need and increase access to dental care. The changes that have been implemented include improvements to ensure dentists are remunerated more fairly for more complex work. We expect to publish our Dental Recovery Plan shortly for further reform to make improvements.