I want to reset relationship between NHS GPs and their Government

When I was appointed to the post of Health Secretary, on my first day I declared that the National Health System is ill and had decided to cure it. That must begin with repairing the input door of the NHS into general practice. 
 
In June, 1. In total, 4 million patients were forced to wait over a month to see an accessible GP. Telegraph readers will understand the pestering of having to wait on the phone at 8 am to enlist for an appointment only to fail. 
 
Indeed, by any measure, after 14 years of the Conservatives, we are a long way removed from the state in which Labour left the country. During the 2005 general election campaign, Tony Blair, appeared on BBC Question Time and was confronted and ‘bailed up’ by an angry man who was annoyed that GP appointments were guaranteed within 48 hours – he wanted an appointment for well in advance of that time. The phrase meaning you should be very cautious when you make a wish so that you do not get what you do not want. 
 
Despite the Tories’ pledge to secure an additional 6,000 family doctors, the party exited the scene with a comparable number of fully-titled GPs today as in 2013. The GPs are burdened, working under immense pressure, and unfortunately, they cannot offer those services to the patients they would want to. 
 
The Conservatives also introduced unnecessary bureaucracy that’s stopping practices from hiring GPs. M hundreds of ex-BPAS GPs will be out of work this summer if we don’t act, officials told me in my first weeks as Health Secretary. Indeed during the election campaign Rishi Sunak was confronted by a GP on this matter and all he did was to laugh it off. 
 
He left us in the ridiculous position of people cannot see a GP, yet GPs cannot secure employment. 
 
We were not ready to witness that go on. On week 1, I requested my department to come up with a solution alongside the NHS. Now, this Government is acting decisively to shed this counter-intuitive set of chains, lock, stock and barrel. This bureaucracy will be removed and another thousand GPs will be employed for the following year with the employment starting from October. 
 
As the Chancellor spelled out earlier this week, we have inherited the state of the public finances as dire as the state of the public services. To sum up, £82m more will be spent on renumerating these GPs for them to join the team, but this money will be sourced from within my departmental budget and therefore, it will be a redistribution of the funds. This implies making very hard decisions over and above existing challenges, but patients’ access to care without undue delay must be the focus. 
 
First step 
 
This is just the first| step towards a Neighborhood Health Service and certainly towards solving the front door problem of the NHS. That will include challenging the paperwork bureaucracy that wastes GPs’ time and prevents them from seeing more of their patients. We will remove some of the nearly 50 activity targets applied to GPs and introduce more focus on the family doctor style so patients can see the same doctor when attending for a follow-up appointment. 
 
We will engage GPs and patients in developing the NHS’s ten-year plan, which will provide for ten years of radical reform to make the health service prepared for the future. 
 
In the last few years I have pecan spend quite a lot of time in exactly that position, looking over the shoulder of GPs and practice staff. I have witnessed this pressure in my last organization. 
 
This is why I can readily understand why GPs would want to ‘kick’ the previous government. But receiving collective action will only penalise the patients. The Conservatives already got the kicking they deserved at the general election I give my own view of the events. 
 
In this present scenario I want to set the relationship between GPs and their government back to square one. We have a genuinely historic chance here to be the generation that revived our NHS from its worst conditions to the strongest that it can be. 
 
I’m asking GPs to work with us; to help get this country back on its feet and create the NHS the patients of this country deserve.