Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what estimate she has made of the additional consultant time required to support Advice and Guidance requests.

The Advice and Guidance (A&G) model helps ensure that patients receive an appropriate and timely assessment, with clear next steps, in primary and community settings. Where specialist advice supports ongoing management in the community, patients can often be managed more quickly and closer to home, benefiting from earlier specialist input.

Under this Government, the A&G model has therefore supported millions of patients to receive care in the right place without unnecessarily having to join elective waiting lists, alongside the 2,000 extra general practitioners (GPs) we have recruited since July 2024. This is one of the reasons 77% of patients are now reporting a ‘good’ overall experience with their GP.

Under A&G, the clinical threshold for a referral remains unchanged, and GPs should continue to make a clinical decision to refer for specialist care where that is in the patient’s best interest. We will continue to assess the safety of the model and support providers to implement it effectively, and we have already commissioned an external evaluation of A&G, and Single Point of Access processes.