Richard Fuller MP

words from

Richard Fuller, MP for North East Bedfordshire

We need to talk about GP services. For many of my constituents, access to a local GP who is able to give their time and expertise is a vital part of their sense of wellbeing.

We are grateful to our GPs for maintaining contact during the pressures of lockdown and, of course, for their role in helping achieve the Prime Minister’s targets for vaccinations – way in advance of most other countries.

Nevertheless, I regularly receive concerns about obtaining appointments or the shift to online or phone consultations.

Across England, from 2016 to 2020, the number of GPs fell every year and, though the number of trainees and locums increased, there was a sense that these trends needed to change. I stood on an election commitment to increase funding for our NHS, including to recruit more GPs and nurses. The downward trend has, slowly, been halted and numbers of GPs are now rising again as are the number of trainees.

That is great for the country, but here in Bedfordshire we are yet to halt the slide with GP numbers continuing to fall and with our population increasingly rapidly, that needs to change.

So, I am speaking up in Parliament to make sure that Bedfordshire gets its fair share of new doctors and am pushing the local commissioning group to do a better job of managing this critical part of primary care.

The Government announced new plans to focus on preventative medicine – streamlining the adoption of new technologies to enable illnesses to be diagnosed earlier or to be avoided all together. The great success of our life sciences industry matched with technology innovation gives our country a huge advantage in global markets.

More funding for the NHS; more GPs and nurses recruited; improving local performance and driving forward preventative medicine should give us hope that we can build back better and healthier.

We are grateful to our GPs for maintaining contact during the pressures of lockdown and, of course, for their role in helping achieve the Prime Minister’s targets for vaccinations

Xanthe Jackson will be a familiar face to regular customers of Frescoes Coffee House. Now she is the owner having taken over from Kevin who is concentrating on his new business: BlueGlass wine bar in St Peter’s Street Bouncing back!

Bedford’s bouncing back to life this summer with markets, shops, outdoor (and soon indoor) eating and drinking

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Bedford has 100s of businesses, many of them run and owned by committed small business entrepreneurs who want to keep the town alive and kicking.

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