Meeting of the Parliament 23 February 2016
I am not asking the cabinet secretary to publish details of the contract, because I entirely understand that she is in negotiations and cannot do so. However, the principles of the contract and the general role of GPs in the new model are critical both to general practitioners’ understanding of where they will go from here and to recruitment.
The cabinet secretary said that I should welcome the fact that there are more GPs. Of course I do, but the fact is that there are now fewer GPs per head of population than there were in 2009. For the first time ever, our number of GPs per head of population is lower than that of the north-east of England, which is the region with which the Nuffield Trust normally compares us when it makes regional comparisons.
Does the cabinet secretary agree with Graham Watt, who said today that 40 per cent of practices—representing 2 million patients—are in difficulty, or does she think that he, too, is being misleading or is misspeaking? How does she reconcile the new clinical strategy’s emphasis on primary care, which is welcome, with the fact that the 2016-17 budget will cut—yet again—the share of funding that goes to primary care?