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NHS |
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Atkins sets out priorities and claims success on nurse and GP appointment targets |
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Victoria Atkins, who is the fifth health and social care secretary to be appointed since Matt Hancock left in June 2021, has set out her priorities for the system. In a news release, she said her priorities were to make services: faster, simpler and fairer, while supporting the NHS over the winter. She defined faster as making it easier to get treatment locally, improving A&E performance, and cutting waiting lists, simpler as meaning more integrated care, and fairer as reducing disparities in health outcomes and “delivering a more productive NHS that is fairer for taxpayers.”
The government has also claimed that it has met its Conservative Party manifesto pledges to recruit an additional 50,000 nurses and generate 50 million more GP appointments. The Nursing Times pointed out that while the nurse target may have been met overall, some specialities have seen numbers decrease, and there are still 42,000 nurse vacancies. Pulse noted that another government pledge – to recruit an additional 6,000 FTE GPs by 2025 – is unlikely to be met. At the moment, the number of fully qualified, FTE GPs is 27,368 – down from 28,129 in December 2019. |
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