Meeting of the Parliament 21 February 2024
The reform process that I and my colleagues will embark on will be informed by people with lived experience, people who work in our NHS, experts, academics, service users and trade unions. That will ensure that the reform package that comes forward is informed by those who use and work in our health services.
I genuinely welcome this debate, and I thank Alex Cole-Hamilton for bringing it to the chamber. This morning, in Boroughloch Medical Practice in Edinburgh, I saw at first hand how primary care services, involving a wide range of skilled professionals, can have a huge impact on health outcomes. They are greatly valued by the communities that they serve.
I am proud of the record investment in primary and community care services of more than £2.1 billion in the draft December budget. That represents our continued commitment to ensuring that primary care services are better focused on meeting people’s needs in a joined-up way.
General practice must be at the heart of our healthcare system. It is unparalleled in managing such a wide range of care needs in the community, from long-term condition management through to urgent unplanned care, with more than 1.5 million GP encounters a month and more than 1 million for other clinicians in practice. There are, of course, demand issues, but we are dedicated to ensuring the sustainability of the GP and wider multidisciplinary team workforce.
In 2017, we committed to adding 800 GPs to the workforce by the end of 2027. At the most recent count, in December, 271 additional GPs had been recorded, and record expansion in our GP specialty training has resulted in there currently being more than 1,200 trainee GPs in Scotland. This is the beginning of our efforts bearing fruit, and we are working with the GP profession on developing a series of recommendations to ensure that we also retain our current GPs.
We are reforming the way that general practice works, through the 4,700 wider multidisciplinary team members who are in post, including pharmacists, physiotherapists, community link workers and mental health practitioners, to name but a few elements. That additional capacity allows teams to work together to support people in the community and free up GPs to spend more time with patients who are in specific need of their expertise.