Transforming general medical practices is essential, says Dodds

“The service that the public receive and the environment in which GPs and public servants work have fundamentally changed over the past 10 or 20 years," she said.

"We need to plan for the future and have a proactive vision of what a really good primary healthcare system can look like. As things stand, however, we know that patients are not being assessed in a timely manner. The workload for GPs is continually expanding, and there really are not sufficient staff to run the service at its optimum.

"We have talked a lot about transforming our health service. There is no doubt that there are big, fundamental issues that we need to work at in transforming services for the community, whether for cancer patients, stroke patients or whomever. However, if we do not transform primary care, we will not achieve a knock-on effect in secondary care in elective and other procedures.

"Sometimes, we think of this being an almost monumental challenge that we cannot overcome, but there are simple things that we can do that will help us to get to that transformation position.

"Two million of us are registered with GPs, yet they receive 5·4% of the healthcare budget. We will have to rebalance that and look at it for the future. That is important in transforming the service. While the motion focuses on GPs and GP practices, primary care is about so much more. It is about community pharmacies and mental health support services. It is about the community and voluntary sector, which does sterling work. Many of those organisations work quietly, bit by bit, with the most vulnerable people in our society

"It is important to remember that we need to embrace change for there to be transformation. If we do not embrace change, services will collapse — we are seeing that — and we will then be transforming services on an ad hoc basis that suits nobody and will not give us a proper vision of primary care.

"In Northern Ireland, fewer than 8% of multidisciplinary teams are fully staffed and equipped. We need to look at how we can manage to do that even though the budget is challenging.

"The initial funding for multidisciplinary teams came from the additional billion pounds that was found in the DUP confidence-and-supply money. It is really important to remember that. I want us to continue to fund those teams, and I will support the Minister in his bid to do so, because they are fundamental to resolving the issue.

"I accept that trusts have done an enormous amount of work to ensure that GP surgeries continue, even though contracts have been handed back. That is massively important. There is also the issue of having accountability for GPs, so that we can understand that the services offered are the same and do not encounter a theme that has been commonly expressed: the inequality of service across Northern Ireland, which is intolerable.”