As the Member of Parliament for our wonderful area, I have been fortunate to meet so many of our wonderful, dedicated NHS staff across the full range of services on offer in our area, from our hospitals to our primary care services.
Of course, so often it is these local primary care services where the majority of the care we access is delivered when we visit the GP, pick-up a prescription from the pharmacist, or go for a check-up at our dentist, so it is important that these local services are supported to do their vital work.
Pushing for improvements to our local health services has always been a key priority for me, which is why I was so delighted last week to read that the new Primary Care Recovery Plan will do just this. Our area will benefit from improved access to care, better support patients to manage their own health, and modernise general practice for the future. Overall, this plan will free-up around 15 million GP appointments nationally over the next two years for patients who need them most through four key areas.
Firstly, this plan tackles the 8am rush for appointments, by investing the equivalent of £35,000 per practice to provide new technology for GPs, making it easier to get through and get a response on the same day. During trials, this has increased patients’ ability to get through to their practice by almost a third.
Secondly, for the first time ever, patients who need prescription medication will soon be able to get it directly from a pharmacy - without a GP appointment - for common conditions thanks to investment to expand community pharmacy services.
In addition, by cutting bureaucracy, this plan will improve communication between GPs and hospitals and reduce GPs having to do work that non-GPs can do. Patients will also now be able to self-refer for some services, including physiotherapy, hearing tests, and podiatry, without seeing their GP first.
Finally, this plan delivers more appointments and more staff in the form of an extra 26,000 clinicians and 50 million extra appointments nationwide by March 2024.
This is excellent news for local patients, building on Lincolnshire’s strong GP recovery from the pandemic. Appointments here are already more likely to be face-to-face than the national average, and there were over 10% more appointments in March 2023 compared to March 2022, almost 25% more than March 2021.
Crucially, this also comes alongside a number of significant investments in local health services over the past year, which also directly benefit our surrounding villages.
I have written here previously about our new innovative Community Diagnostic Centre which opened just last May, and more recently, Grantham Hospital has opened two new operating theatres which will increase available theatre capacity by 50%, so more local people can have the operations they need more quickly.
For many, I know that accessing local GP services has been challenging, including at Lakeside Healthcare in Stamford, over which I have engaged at length with local NHS leaders. I hope that this new plan will support the gradual improvements we have seen over recent months to make this vital local service more accessible for local people.
Going forward over the coming weeks, I will be launching an online survey for residents in Stamford to gather their views. I hope that the result of this survey will be invaluable in helping to inform my ongoing discussion with those responsible, and I will write to our local NHS leaders in my capacity as Stamford’s MP to share the results to further highlight the strength of feeling locally on the issues impacting our town’s GP services.
