Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to improve access to NHS GP appointments in (a) Bournemouth East constituency and (b) the South West.

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 improve access across England: 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. The plan will empower patients to do more themselves, cut bureaucracy for GPs to make more time available for appointments and build 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.

There were 3.38 million general practice appointments in the South West region in September 2023, up from 3.03 million in September 2022. Appointment data is not published at constituency level.