Photo credit: House of Commons / Roger Harris

One of my constituents, a deaf man, recently told me that when he went online to book a GP appointment. He selected email or text as the only way to reach him, but the default slot offered only a phone call. An older woman in my patch spent weeks housebound and in pain after an injury, yet was only offered a phone call for a problem impossible to diagnose remotely.

Neither were asking for special treatment, but simply for a service that works for them. Too often, it doesn’t. Primary care accounts for 90 per cent of the public’s contact with the NHS; it’s where our health service is judged, and the verdict is damning. Satisfaction with the NHS has fallen to 26 per cent, and nearly half of the public say they avoid contacting their GP.…