To ask the Minister of Health to detail any work he has undertaken in recent months to improve access to GPs.

I recognise the importance of access to GP services for patients. As you will be aware, in response to increasing patient demand GPs are utilising a mixed consultation model with telephone, video and face to face consultations as a means of managing the rising demand on services within the existing workforce while retaining responsiveness to those patients who need the most urgent attention and care.

As independent contractors, who provide primary medical services to their registered list of patients under the terms of the General Medical Services Contracts Regulations, 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.

There are approximately 200k consultations across general practice in Northern Ireland each week, with over 50% of those delivered face to face.

Additional measures have been put in place to support primary care to adapt flexibly to increasing demand. These include maintaining GP training place numbers at an historic high level of 121, additional investment in general practice and increasing the range of healthcare professionals working in primary care.

The recently announced allocation of £61m of Transformation funding to the Primary Care MDT Programme will enable completion of the model in the 7 existing MDT areas, and expansion into 5 new GP Federation areas with a population of around 670,000 people, over the next 4 years to the end of 2028/29.

The new areas to benefit from transformation funding are North Belfast, the South-West (Fermanagh/ West Tyrone), East Antrim, Craigavon and Dungannon/ Armagh.

My Department has also established a GP Access Working Group to explore issues relating to access to services and develop a programme of work to help address these and improve the experience for patients. The Working Group includes representatives from General Practice and service users among its membership.

The GP Access Working Group is currently overseeing development of a suite of guidance to cover good practice in demand management, workflow optimisation and standardisation of processes.

The Group is also considering how technology can help to deliver improvements to the process for accessing services for patients and practices alike.