Written question WQ94131

The Welsh Government has taken a number of steps to make it easier for people in Wales to contact and be seen by their GP. This has included investment in infrastructure, funding improvement activity and legislative change.

In 2022, the General Medical Services Access Commitment was introduced to address the challenge of the morning bottleneck for appointments.

In March 2024, 97% of practices reported they were meeting this commitment, and that in their practice:

• All-patient facing staff had undertaken care navigation training within three months of starting work

• They offer a mix of remote, face to face, urgent, on the day and pre-bookable appointments

• They maintain a planned and forward-looking approach to scheduling of appointments throughout the day, or for future dates, meaning that all appointments for that day are no longer released at 8am

• They collect patient feedback and use this to develop an access improvement plan, taking account of how they have engaged with patients.

As part of their management of local GP contracts, we expect health boards to verify the evidence provided by practices and to check these standards are being maintained.

We supported the introduction of the access improvements with £12m over three years from April 2022 to help GP practices build their capacity through additional staff. This followed an investment of £3.7m in 2019-20 for digital telephony improvements.

We have used legislation underpinning the new Unified Contract for GPs, introduced in October 2023, to make our expectations on practice opening times and digital access methods a contractual requirement, improving the consistency of the GP access offer across Wales. To support health boards in ensuring these requirements are met, we launched a new Contract Assurance Framework in April, which provides a standardised, national set of indicators, through which health boards can monitor local delivery of GP services by their GMS contractors.