Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate he has made of the time taken to obtain non-emergency GP appointments in (a) England and (b) Gloucestershire; and if he will make a statement.

The time between booking an appointment with a general practice and having the appointment (in days) for the practices where data is currently collected in Gloucestershire Clinical Commissioning Group is presented in the following table for the last available published date, February 2019. A 12- month average from March 2018-February 2019 has also been presented along with a comparison to the average across all appointments in England. NHS Digital’s ‘Appointments in General Practice’ data is published monthly with a two-month time lag.

The appointments data does not differentiate between emergency and routine appointments in general practice and the ‘time from booking to appointment’ does not take into consideration that many patients will be appropriately booking ahead as part of the continuity of care they receive for long-term conditions.

The data on general practitioner (GP) appointments are from a new data collection and are still experimental therefore the data and collection method are still being refined and improved. Whilst these early datasets published by NHS Digital do not yet represent a comprehensive picture, they are an important key step in understanding pressures on primary care. NHS England, NHS Digital and the government are working closely with GPs to understand how the data on GP appointments can be refined to improve the overall picture of primary care activity.