Doctors’ surgeries wanting to trial new ways of patient appointments or ways to communicate with patients will continue to be supported by the Department of Health and Social Care.

Minister David Ashford was asked by Lawrie Hooper (Lib Vannin, Ramsey) what support there is for GP practices to enable them to develop and use new approaches to offering patient appointments.

Mr Ashford said that his department has ’long been supportive’ of practices that have wanted to utilise new approaches to appointments. He said that the text reminders for appointments, introduced at cost to the department, had ’reduced the overall did not attend rate by over 30%’ when they were launched a few years ago.

He said that DHSC ’regularly’ has meetings with practice managers through a forum and GPs also have meetings with department staff to look at new approaches.

’Other initiatives have come from the overall payment made to GP practices’, Mr Ashford said.

’To give an example of this, most GPs surgeries now have an electronic check in system. While the department has been instrumental in supporting the process to ensure the check in systems are installed correctly from an IT and infrastructure perspective, the practices have funded these themselves.

Where the systems had been installed, this had led to staff being deployed in the practices in other ways.

Mr Ashford also noted that his department has rolled out online services for residents 24 hours a day. This is done through Patient Access and is also available through an app.

Mr Hooper suggested that the system ’seemed a little ad hoc’. However Mr Ashford said DHSC funding ’allowed practices to make the changes they want’.