Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether she has made an assessment of the potential merits of reviewing general practice funding streams to account for potential additional resource requirements in socio-economically deprived communities.

The Department is committed to ensuring patients living in deprived areas have access to good health care. The Carr-Hill formula, which is used to calculate core funding for practices, reflects differences in the age and sex composition of the practice’s registered patient list, together with a range of factors that take into account the additional pressures generated by differential rates of patient turnover, morbidity, mortality, and the impact of geographical location. Under this formula, practices whose registered patients have greater healthcare needs are paid more per patient than practices whose registered patients have fewer healthcare needs.