I’m very pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to this important debate. Perhaps I’ve mentioned before that I’m a GP, but if I haven’t mentioned that enough, I repeat it this afternoon. But the fact that people are living longer is a matter of praise for the health service, if anything. We are used to hearing people criticising the staff and the health service, but, at least, when there’s evidence and it’s a clear fact that we’re all living longer, it should be a matter of praise for the health service, for the NHS.

Of course, the surgery, as a rule, is usually the first place that people turn to when they’re in need—the first port of call. What we’re increasingly finding is that that service in the surgery is under terrific pressure. We know the figures: 90 per cent of our patients are seen in primary care—we used to say on 10 per cent of the budget, but, as we’ve heard already, that percentage of the budget has gone down to 7.45 per cent. There is a requirement, therefore, on GPs and their staff to do more with fewer resources. Following on from what the Royal College of General Practitioners and the BMA have been saying over the last few months, there is a need to divert and change the budget back to what it used to be, which was about 11 per cent of the NHS budget, because, in essence, the number of appointments that we have with our patients is on the increase. Those appointments are more intense and more complex, because of the nature of the illnesses, as we’ve heard from David Rees. Older people have more than one chronic condition, and it is a significant challenge to deal with all of them in 10 minutes. At the end of the day, what we’re concerned about as GPs is that we want to improve the quality of that discussion between the GP or the nurse and the patient. We only have 10 minutes, and that’s on a good day, because, on average, we see between 50 and 80 patients every day. What we want to see is an improvement in the quality of those 10 minutes that we have. That’s why we need more funding and resources: in order to employ more GPs in the first place, but also more nurses, more physiotherapists and so forth, and also social workers in our practices, and, I would say, on every ward in our hospitals. That’s where the collaboration with social services comes in, and is so important.

We don’t need expensive reorganisation. We want social workers working with us in surgeries, arranging social services for our patients, but also on the wards—to have one social worker there who can arrange how that patient is going to be discharged at an early stage with all the arrangements in place. That’s why there’s a need to employ more workers at grass-roots level. That’s why we need a greater part of that budget coming to primary care. We need to increase it from 7.45 per cent back to where it was, around 11 per cent, because 90 per cent of the patients are seen in primary care, and we want the resources to offer an improved service. Those resources include employing more GPs. As David has already said, there are some things that only a GP can do. We need more of them. But we have make the work, the job, more attractive to our young doctors who are now in our hospitals. They need to be better influenced than they are at the moment to become GPs. All those plans that we have already to attract doctors back to general practice—we have to improve them, and it must be made easier to attract our most able GPs back to general practice, particularly in our most rural communities and most deprived communities.

So, there are many challenges, as we’ve heard, but we need to address those challenges. Ultimately, our health service relies on general practice that is also fresh and energised and that can solve the majority of problems in our communities. If we were to divert just a small percentage more of our patients to hospitals, then our hospitals would be under even greater strain than they are at the moment. By investing more money in primary care, we could prevent many people from having to go to A&E departments or from being on waiting lists in the first place, because we have the resources and the ability to arrange things for our patients in the community, but we have to have more assistance. I would be pleased to hear from the Minister if he would be willing to meet with the leaders of GPs in Wales in order to discuss the way forward. Thank you.