To ask the Minister of Health to detail any steps being taken to ensure patients have access to routine, non-urgent GP appointments, given that many practices continue to operate on an emergency-only basis despite the lifting of COVID-19 restrictions.

As independent contractors and clinical professionals, GPs are responsible for making appropriate decisions about the treatment, care and management of individual patients. This also means that decisions about the day to day running of the surgery, including the use of technology, telephony and the appointment system, are determined locally by the GP practice within the constraints of their available workforce.

My Department gathers data based on weekly survey returns from practices on the number of consultations delivered in Primary Care. This encompasses consultations across the whole practice teams (e.g. GPs, practice employed nurses, TRNs, ANPs, MDT staff, paramedics, practice-based pharmacists) and is not disaggregated by profession.

There are approximately 200k patient contacts each week, across the whole clinical team in general practice.

Additional measures have been put in place to support primary care to adapt flexibly to increasing demand. My Department has recently announced investment of £61m over the next 4 years to support the wider rollout of the the Primary Care MDT model which will provide access to a wider range of services in Primary Care and will help stabilise GP services.

As part of the 2025/26 GMS contract proposals, my Department engaged with the NIGPC on a range of measures to improve the patient experience of accessing GP services. Regrettably, it was not possible to reach agreement with NIGPC on the contract. My Department is now proceeding to implement the 2025/26 GMS contract, which will see an additional £9.5m invested into core GP services. This will include the access improvement measures.

The access improvements include a requirement for Practices make some of their appointment slots pre-bookable, so that patients do not always have to call back another time when daily capacity is reached; making sure that Practices make the most of existing digital functionality to make ordering repeat prescriptions easier; requiring Practices to ensure their staff deal with patients appropriately when they ‘walk in’ to make an appointment; and a new requirement for GPs to establish patient participation groups, to give patients a voice in how they are served by the Practice.

These measures are based on existing good practice in Northern Ireland, are designed to be implementable by GPs with no additional staff requirement, and are intended to make small but tangible improvement to the patient experience of accessing GP services.