5. Statement by the Minister for Health and Social Services: A Healthier Wales — Update on the 'Train. Work. Live.' Campaign

Part of the debate – in the Senedd at 5:17 pm on 3 December 2019.

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Photo of Vaughan Gething Vaughan Gething Labour 5:17, 3 December 2019

Thank you for the questions. In terms of next year's GP training numbers, I've set a baseline of 160, and as I indicated in my statement, my intention is to be able to progressively raise the number of GP training places that we will have available to want to fill as our new baseline. However, that does depend on our ability to have the requisite number of training places in practices. So, I'm looking forward to some advice from Health Education and Improvement Wales about our ability within the system to progressively increase and successfully recruit to those numbers.

In terms of the specific issue you raised about the primary care estate, I'm not aware of the specific issue that you raise where a health board is preventing people from expanding provision, because we should remember that there's a balance here, isn't there? Because general practice is largely provided by independent contractors, some of whom own their own buildings, some of whom have a partnership with a range of other services to work from particular premises. And so, in investing in the primary care estate, we're more and more looking to invest in a combination of those, and to understand that, in the past, when we were helping to build facilities that the NHS didn't own, that brought different challenges too. So, that is partly about the partnership model and what happens. These are real practical issues that are part of our conversation with the general practice committee of the BMA. But, on the provision of a new generation of centres, the primary care pipeline, 19 individual schemes, including the recent good news that we had that the Mountain Ash scheme is on site now. So, we are actually delivering a newer range of premises already.

In terms of the issue about keeping current GPs, I'll try to deal with that in terms of the questions that Angela Burns asked. I didn't get to it in terms of the list of questions, but in terms of the points about the incentive schemes, that's important for keeping current GPs in practice as well, so they don't feel that there's no supply for future general practice as well. But we are looking to review the impact of those incentives, not just in the areas that have got incentives for what have been hard-to-recruit-to areas, but also to look to see if there's been an impact on surrounding general practice schemes. This year, that would appear not to be the case, because we filled every scheme. But as we said, a new baseline for each of those training schemes, I want to see what the direct impact is. 

In terms of the locum register, look, I think this is really important for us to understand where and how many locums we have and the terms on which they're engaged. And part of the deal in the new contract that we've agreed with the general practice committee of the BMA is actually about how we incentivise people to come off the locum way of working and to become either salaried or, indeed, partners in general practice as well, and to provide us with the stability that we'd want. And there's a generational challenge there as well, which is, honest, not just within the health service but on a much wider basis, about how we help people to look at what's on offer within the NHS and to understand what's on offer, and they commit to that career, whether as a primary care contractor or otherwise, and then the register should help us to do that and to be much clearer about the terms on which people are engaged.