Local health bosses say there are more GP and dentistry appointments now than ever, but acknowledge there’s still work to do to get where they need to be
Director of service development Sarah-Jane Mills and chief operating officer for the East, Sandra Williamson of the Lincolnshire Integrated Care Board, were grilled last week by South Holland District Council’s Performance Monitoring Panel.
They outlined proposals to make the service more affectable locally.
Sarah-Jane Mills said that there were 120 per cent more GP appointments this year across the NHS than in 2019.
“Every year in Lincolnshire we have in excess of five million appointments,” she said.
“About 90 per cent of the county will contact the health care service.
“We’re on our way with the first steps to improve the service we offer.
“We’ve got to provide more access and be more efficient.
“I think we’d all accept the increase in demand makes it very difficult to match the need for regular contact.
“That’s why we have the plan and if we can improve access we can reintegrate the continuity of care.”
Sarah-Jane said 41.7 per cent of people were given an appointment on the same day of getting in touch.
“That’s above the national average, so we’re in a good place,” she said.
However they are below target for appointments within two weeks.
She told the meeting that bids to recruit doctors into Lincolnshire had been “very, successful” due to incentives on offer.
“You’ll have heard a lot of GPs are leaving the NHS. That’s not untrue but they don’t want to stop doing clinical work.
“They perhaps want to focus on a particular area or want to stop the burden of running the business.
“There’s a lot of work creating roles for those GPs.”
She said It was not always about opening new GP surgeries.
“It may well be about how we support the development of services that already exist.”
A national policy for pharmacies to be able to see more patients was being supported.
Ms Mills said claiming all pharmacies in the county had signed up: “There’s new investment to pharmacy,” she said. “It’s really exciting.
“It will help them develop their services.
“We’re going to develop our own community pharmacy strategy.
“It will be aimed at not just opening more but also the workforce development as the more they do, the more skills they will need.
“We’re not there yet, we’re only at the start of developing the strategy.”
l The Integrated Care Board took over looking after dental practices last April and Ms Williamson said they too were developing a local strategy.
She said that performance in South Holland was “slightly lower than the Lincolnshire average”
“While the access might not be what we’d like, it’s better than the national average,” she said. “There’s no quality issues though.”
Ms Williamson said that South Holland was the only area in the county where dental practices were 8am to 8pm 365 days a year in a bid to see more people.
But Coun Andrew Woolf warned that one of the town’s dentists was in the process of leaving the NHS.
“We fully acknowledge within Lincolnshire some of the challenge of NHS dental care,” Ms Williamson continued. “It’s been happening over a number of years.
“Over the last 12 months we’ve been looking to develop a strategy locally.
“We want to improve dental access and we’re working with the community and out stakeholders to create a strategy locally.”
