Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what estimate he has made of the number of GP practices to receive support in 2016-17 under the General Practice Resilience Programme.

The General Practice Resilience Programme is a four-year £40 million programme which devolves funding to NHS England’s 13 local teams to secure and deliver a wide menu of support to practices prioritised locally, against nationally set criteria.

NHS England is offering support to over a thousand general practices under the first wave of the General Practice Resilience Programme. The assessments carried out by NHS England local teams, concluded on 18 October 2016, identified 1,062 individual practices that will benefit from support this year to help improve sustainability and resilience, including support upstream of difficulties occurring. NHS England believe that the actual number to be offered support is likely to be greater, as some NHS England local teams are additionally targeting support across geographical areas more generally.