Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps NHS England is taking to ensure that Single Point of Access pathways do not prevent patients being referred to consultant-led services where GPs consider it clinically appropriate.

Under Single Point of Access Pathways, general practitioners (GPs) should continue to make a clinical decision to refer for specialist care where that is in the patient’s best interests. GPs retain responsibility for referral decisions, and this model supports, and does not replace, clinical judgement. It is important to emphasise that the clinical threshold for a referral remains unchanged.