Following South West Bedfordshire MP Andrew Selous’s question to the Prime Minister yesterday about speeding up the roll out of the General Practice ‘Getting it Right First Time’ programme, the National Director of Clinical Improvement for NHS England and the Chair of ‘Getting it Right First Time’, Professor Tim Briggs the originator of the programme has said that Leighton Buzzard GP Surgeries will be in the first wave of the roll out of ‘Getting it Right First Time’ with the evidence collected to be reviewed early.
Andrew Selous said
“Professor Briggs and I worked for over 8 years to get the NHS to bring in the ‘Getting it Right First Time’ programme. It was originally brought in for Orthopaedics and now has extended to over 30 different medical specialisms and most recently General Practice. The pilot phase of ‘Getting it Right First Time’ for General Practice has now been concluded and Professor Briggs, who has already visited Leighton Road Surgery at my request has agreed to come back to Leighton Buzzard to assist the GPs in the town with the roll out of ‘Getting it Right First Time’ for GPs.
As a member of the Health and Social Care Select Committee I visited Larwood House in Worksop which is an outstanding practice and I also made reference to similarly outstanding practices in Whitstable and Peterborough. What we need to do now is to spread this outstanding practice across all surgeries so that everyone can benefit from the very best primary care.”
The exchange in the House of Commons yesterday was as follows:
Andrew Selous (South West Bedfordshire) (Con)
The Prime Minister knows of the huge improvements to the quality of clinical care brought about by the Getting It Right First Time programme authored by Professor Tim Briggs, who I brought to see her, and indeed to see Gordon Brown as well. Given the importance our constituents place on a good service from their local GP practice, will she ensure that the general practice roll-out of Getting It Right First Time is speeded up so that the excellent practice in places like Worksop, Whitstable and Peterborough can be made available to all our constituents?
I thank my hon. Friend not only for his question but for bringing Professor Tim Briggs to see me. When Professor Briggs came to see me, he did raise this issue of spreading the concept of getting it right first time beyond hospital consultants and into GP practices. My hon. Friend is absolutely right: we should make sure that we do that. We want to make sure that absolutely the best practice is adopted by GP practices across the whole country—that is for the benefit of all our constituents.