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  • 6 hours ago
Sir Ed Davey unveils a Liberal Democrat plan to "guarantee" an adequate number of GP surgeries for new housing developments. Davey says the plan would end the "vicious cycle" of oversubscribed GP surgeries across the UK. Report by Keechl. Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/itn and follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/itn
Transcript
00:00A new guarantee for our communities that can be summed up in four simple words.
00:04No doctors, no in development.
00:07What does that mean in practice?
00:09It means that the local authority and the NHS would work together
00:13to identify how much extra GP capacity is needed to serve new developments
00:19and then the required developers to pay for it through their levies.
00:25Crucially, that means funding not just the bricks and mortar of GP surgeries,
00:30but also the contracts so there are actually doctors to staff them
00:34while patients are first moving in.
00:38Because what happens right now, as we all know too well,
00:41is that GP surgeries for new developments are often promised but never delivered.
00:47That's because building the surgeries often takes too long
00:51and there's no new money to fund the GP contracts
00:54until patients have moved into an area,
00:56meaning they just can't hire the staff when the first homes are sold.
01:02So the first new residents go to oversubscribed GP practices elsewhere,
01:06meaning there's still no new money for the new surgery,
01:09meaning it simply never materialises.
01:12This is all because the government just doesn't understand how important this is,
01:18because it doesn't understand what communities really need.
01:23Our plan would end that vicious cycle.
01:26Go to the CRC.
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