Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what progress he has made on proposals for NHS seven day services.

We have set the National Health Service the objective that, by the end of this Parliament, patients with urgent and emergency hospital care needs will have access to the same level of consultant review, diagnostic tests and treatment seven days a week. Hospitals will deliver this for 25% of the population by March 2017, 50% by March 2018 and everyone by 2020.

NHS England and NHS Improvement are working with local health and care systems to ensure that seven-day services can be implemented affordably and sustainably, recognising that different solutions will be needed in different localities.

The Government has also committed that by 2020 everyone will be able to access routine general practitioner (GP) appointments at evenings and weekends.

To implement the Government’s commitment to transform GP access, £175 million has been invested in the GP Access Fund to test improved and innovative access to GP services. Across the two waves of the Access Fund, there are 57 schemes covering over 2,500 practices, and over 18 million patients – a third of the population – have benefitted from improved access and transformational change at a local level.