Meeting of the Parliament 23 February 2016
I did not accuse anyone of misleading anyone about anything; I said that Scotland has the highest number of GPs per head of population of the four UK countries. That is a fact. Under this Government, the number of GPs who are working in Scotland has increased by 7 per cent. That is a fact.
Of course, there is more to be done and, as Richard Simpson rightly pointed out, the national clinical strategy has primary care at its heart. On the principle of the new contract and the new model of care, there is no secret: the approach is based around multidisciplinary teams that have GPs as the clinical experts. We are doing widespread testing of the approach throughout Inverclyde, which will give us the detail about how the model works in practice and will inform the contract negotiations. As I said, I am more than happy to keep Richard Simpson and Parliament updated on that testing of the model and on the negotiations on the new contract.