What is the Cabinet Secretary doing to ensure practical barriers to access of GP practices are removed for older people, in light of the report Access to GP Practices in Wales by the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales?
In delivering on our Programme for Government commitment to improve access to doctors, nurses, dentists and other health professionals, we have taken a number of steps to make it easier for everyone in Wales, including older people, to access GP services.
We are investing £12m over three years from April 2022 to help GP practices build their capacity through additional staff to support improvements to access. Further investment of £3.7m for digital telephony improvements was included in the 2019/20 contract agreement. Following this, the new Unified Contract introduced last year has made it a contractual requirement for practices to have appropriate telephony and call handling systems in place which support the needs of callers and avoids the need for people to call back multiple times.
Through the new contract, we have also made it a requirement for practices that people are able to request a non-urgent consultation through a digital method of access. While we are mindful of issues of digital exclusion, this complementary access method will reduce the number of phone calls to practices, ensuring that people who contact the practice by phone can have their call answered more quickly.
The new contract also specifies the hours during which people must be able to physically access their practice in order to make an appointment, should they wish to do this in person.
Alongside these contractual changes, we continue to work with the GP profession to embed the Access Commitment requires GP practices to adopt a blended model of access, offering a mix of remote, face-to-face, urgent, on-the-day and pre-bookable appointments. At March 2023, 95% of practices confirmed that this model was in place.
The recent report by the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales on GP access helpfully highlights the experiences of older people in using GP services and my officials continue to engage with the Commissioner on how the access offer may be tailored to the needs of specific groups to ensure equitable access to services.