Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make an assessment of the potential benefits to patient safety of a national alert system to (a) flag unsafe levels of workload and (b) allow GPs to access additional support.

It is for integrated care boards to work with practices to determine appropriate local escalation processes for periods of increased demand. We are working to reduce unnecessary workload and cut bureaucracy for general practice staff by implementing the Bureaucracy Busting Concordat, improving the interface between primary and secondary care, and streamlining the Investment and Impact Fund, and we are building capacity in the system by recruiting larger multidisciplinary teams. There are now over 31,000 full-time equivalent additional primary care professionals in post compared to March 2019.