Thérèse Coffey sets out plan to tackle struggling NHS

Health Secretary Thérèse Coffey has said she will improve patients’ access to GPs, providing same-day appointments for those who need them.

Amid declining public satisfaction over access to GPs, surgeries will be able to take on extra staff, including senior nurses, and pharmacists will be required to do more to free up doctors’ appointments.

Coffey has pledged to reduce the need for an “8am scramble” to book GP appointments, said The Times. “Better telephone systems will ensure that more calls are answered and sent to the right place,” said the paper.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

She has promised a “laser-like focus on the needs of patients, making their priorities my priorities and being a champion for them on the issues that affect them most”, the paper added.

The plan hinges on patients being able to get a non-urgent GP appointment within two weeks and a same-day urgent slot, but asked on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme whether this was a guarantee, a target or just an ambition, Coffey said it was “an expectation” that she was setting out on behalf of patients.

On hearing the plan, GP leaders said that promises of faster appointments were “not a plan” and did nothing to address a chronic shortage of doctors.

The Royal College of GPs (RCGP) accused Coffey of “burdening already hard-pressed GP surgeries with new targets that will not improve care”. Professor Martin Marshall, the RCGP chair, told The Guardian that 85% of patients are already seen by a GP within two weeks and 44% were seen on the day they called.

“Lumbering a struggling service with more expectations, without a plan as to how to deliver them, will only serve to add to the intense workload and workforce pressures GPs and our teams are facing, whilst also having minimal impact on the care patients receive,” he said.

Writing for The Telegraph, former health secretary Jeremy Hunt encouraged Coffey to look at the bigger picture. The “real test of her announcement will be whether she looks at the long-term reforms that could break the cycle of long waits, burned out staff and declining standards”, he said.