Lewisham residents are increasingly accessing GP appointments face-to-face, with a rate of 75.74% reported in June 2025. In that month, Lewisham GP practices delivered 111,636 appointments, with over 75% being in person. This was revealed at the Healthier Communities Select Committee meeting on Thursday, 4 September 2025, where members discussed primary care access, dentistry, integrated neighbourhood teams, and adult social care performance.
Ashley O'Shaughnessy, Associate Director for Community Based Care and Primary Care (Lewisham), South East London ICB, presented the data as part of an update on primary care access in Lewisham. The update was structured around the four headings of the national Delivery plan for recovering access to primary care: empower patients, implement 'Modern General Practice', build capacity, and cut bureaucracy.
The 'Modern General Practice' model aims to meet the needs of both patients and staff and make the best use of services through several components:
- optimising contact channels
- structured information gathering
- using one care navigation (and workflow) process across all access channels
- better allocating existing capacity to need
- building capability in general practice teams
To 'build capacity' in primary care, Lewisham is utilising the Additional Roles Reimbursement Scheme (ARRS) to bring in roles such as first contact physiotherapists, clinical pharmacists, social prescribing link workers, health and wellbeing coaches, care coordinators, and mental health and wellbeing practitioners. Enhanced Access is also being implemented, providing additional appointments on weekday evenings (6.30pm-8pm) and on Saturdays (9am-5pm). Furthermore, estates improvements are underway, with funding secured to expand and improve GP premises, including additional consulting rooms at Oakview Family Practice, Parkview Surgery, Wells Park Practice, and Woodlands Health Centre.
Several initiatives are also being targeted to 'cut bureaucracy' and improve primary care access in Lewisham. These include establishing robust systems for sharing contact details between primary and secondary care colleagues, implementing a formal inappropriate request
process for GP practices to use when tasks are sent back from secondary care, creating a WhatsApp group between primary and secondary care colleagues for quick issue resolution, launching podcasts with primary and secondary care colleagues to share learning and insight, and organizing a joint grand round where clinicians discuss case studies based around the patient journey.
