Charlotte Leslie – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department of Health

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Charlotte Leslie on 2016-03-18.

To ask the Secretary of State for Health, what assessment he has made of the change in capacity of GPs to conduct their NHS Health Check obligations resulting from changes in funding for those obligations in the last 12 months.

Alistair Burt

There are no statutory obligations for general practitioners (GPs) to provide the NHS Health Check. The programme is one of the mandated public health functions of local authorities in England. They are responsible for making provision to offer an NHS Health Check to eligible individuals aged 40-74 years once every five years. It is for local authorities to decide on the provider for the NHS Health Check. They can commission a combination of providers including pharmacies and community trusts, as well as GP practices.

Public Health England has recently commissioned a stocktake of the NHS Health Check to understand how best to support local implementation of the programme. The results will be published later this year.

Since local authorities became responsible for providing the NHS Health Check, we have seen year on year improvement in the number of people accessing the NHS Health Check, with an additional 100,000 checks received during 2014/15. A recent national evaluation has also shown that people from deprived communities are benefiting the most.