AQW 31729/22-27
Mr Eóin Tennyson
Alliance Party
Upper Bann
Tabled Date: 22/09/2025
Answered On Date: 26/09/2025
Priority Written: Yes
Question:
To ask the Minister of Health for an update on the provision of complex wound dressings following the announcement by GPs in the Southern Health and Social Care Trust that they are removing this care from their treatment room services.
Answer:
I regret that it was not possible to secure agreement with the NI General Practitioners Committee on this year’s contract and their subsequent decision to take collective action. The 2025/26 GMS contract included an additional £9.5m investment in General Practice. In the context of the inadequate budget allocated to my Department by the Executive, and the extremely challenging financial position the Department faces, this represented the best possible offer that could be made. In addition to the 2025/26 GMS contract, my Department has announced investment of a further £61m into the Primary Care MDT programme over the next 5 years, which will expand the range of services available in Primary Care and help address the high levels of demand being dealt with by our GP practices, as well as £2.9m into the GP Elective Service which will increase the levels of service being provided in important primary care services including the Gynae service. I have also accepted pay recommendations for 2025/26 from the relevant bodies and have issued a Ministerial Direction instructing their immediate implementation. The Ministerial Direction has been referred to the Executive for approval. Taken together, total investment in General Practice in 2025/26 would be £414m. My priority has been, and continues to be, to ensure that patients can continue to access safe, high quality, sustainable GP services when they need to. This continues to apply during collective action. GPs must continue to deliver upon their contractual commitments as they take this action and ensure that impact on patients is minimised. Any action that is taken must respect contractual obligations, protect patient safety, and maintain service access. My Department has written to GPs to remind them of their responsibilities on these issues and will closely monitor adherence to ensure that practices continue to deliver to their contractual requirements. The Trust is accepting the referrals for wound care to be delivered in an alternative clinical setting or potentially in the patient’s own home, processes are currently being put in place to ensure a smooth transition. The Trust will be monitoring the work flow for this service. In terms of access to GP services more widely, the General Medical Services (GMS) contract for 2025/26, introduced a range of measures which, while relatively small in scale, will make a tangible improvement to the patient experience of accessing GP services. These measures do not seek to increase the number of consultations delivered nor to make GPs work to unsafe levels. Rather, they aim to create small but significant improvement to the patient experience of access, to remove some of the friction points for patients that can make the experience worse for patients and practices alike. In many cases, these are things that practices here are already doing and the aim has been to seek to spread that good practice across the region. Looking to the future of General Practice, I am committed to working with GPs on the future of primary care services and that we continue to engage constructively with General Practice. My Department has invited NIGPC to engage in formal negotiations to develop a new GMS contract for 2026/27, with the aim of helping stabilise practices and enabling practices to play a leading role in the new neighbourhood model of care outlined in my Department’s recently published Health and Social Care Reset Plan.
|