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00:00Can you tell me a little bit about the purpose of your visit down here today at Thistle Moor?
00:04It's been amazing to come to Thistle Moor as the Minister for Care with responsibility
00:10for primary care. I'm really interested in examples of how you get real integration between
00:16pharmacy, general practice, mental health and also it was amazing to see their new endoscopy
00:24centre unit that they've set up here. So for us it's all about these shifts from hospital
00:31to community, from sickness to prevention and from analogue to digital and what I've
00:36seen at Thistle Moor today encapsulates all of those key drivers that we want to have
00:41in our ten year plan for the future of our health and care system.
00:45What are some of the lessons that you've learnt from talking to staff here that you can take
00:48back to Parliament to help better inform decision making going forward?
00:52I think the three words that you take away from this set up are integration, integration,
00:57integration. It's amazing to see that you've got a patient centred approach to care so
01:03that whenever a resident of Peterborough comes in here, whether they need a pharmacy service
01:11or a general practice, it might be childcare issues, social prescribing, the whole set
01:18up is here and that means that it's much better for the system overall because it means
01:23people don't have to get referred into hospital when they don't need to be, it means they
01:27get the care they need in their local community and it means you've got this upstream work
01:32going on about preventing people from getting sick in the first place. Prevention is always
01:36better than cure and Thistle Moor really does embody that virtue.
01:41What are some of the priorities of this government and how they can help surgeries such as Thistle
01:45Moor generally across the country? How do you think the government can help?
01:50So we're working hard with the BMA, the union that represents all primary care, the GPC,
01:59the committee there around putting a new contract in place. We've given £889 million uplift
02:06to that contract this year and we're negotiating now about how we can help surgeries improve
02:11their digital infrastructure, how they can get more GPs in through the additional roles
02:18reimbursement scheme, how we can improve continuity of care so that you bring back the family
02:23doctor and how we improve telephony services and reception services so that we end the
02:298am scramble. So there's a whole bunch of reforms that are coming down the track now,
02:33the negotiations with the GPC are ongoing, they've been very constructive and we're confident
02:39that we're going to be able to put a package together that brings all of primary care with
02:44us on the journey to a reformed and far more productive and effective health and care system.
02:50So it's all about getting people easier access to their GP and more GPs generally available
02:55to them?
02:57Access is absolutely key and quality of outcomes is really key and the way to achieve that
03:03particularly is around bringing back the family doctor. All of the data shows that when a
03:09patient sees repeatedly the same doctor, the doctor that knows them, knows their family,
03:13knows their family history, you actually get far fewer repeat visits because you've got
03:18that family doctor there and I think that's something that's been lost over the last 14
03:23years of conservative neglect and incompetence. We are fixing that, we're stabilising the
03:29system and we're bringing forward reforms to make it fit for the future.
03:33And you're trying to integrate, get more communities, get into more different types of communities
03:37to make sure that everybody in Peterborough has access to a doctor and feels that they
03:41can reach out to a GP as well?
03:43I think that's absolutely right and what you really get a feeling of here is this is truly
03:48a part of the community. This is a family business which I think was started with a
03:53few hundred patients and now has 32,000 patients here. It's absolutely extraordinary what's
03:58achieved. So even though it's grown in scale, it's still very much rooted in the community
04:03and that's what we need to do. In order to take pressure off secondary care, off hospitals,
04:08get that backlog down, you've got to use primary care because this is the front door to our
04:15NHS. If you don't fix the front door, you're going to struggle to fix the rest of the system
04:19and I think what we're seeing today here in Thistlemore is an exemplary way of doing primary
04:26care to achieve the aims that we all want to achieve.