New Prime Minister Liz Truss has named Therese Coffey as her health secretary as well as deputy Prime Minister.
Ms Coffey has most recently served as work and pensions secretary since 2019.
She was also minister of state at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs between July 2019 and September 2019.
It comes as earlier this evening, Ms Truss said in her first speech as Prime Minister that ensuring people have access to GP appointments is one of her ‘three early priorities’ in the role.
It is thought that this is a task that will be largely handed to Ms Coffey, who also led Ms Truss’s Tory leadership campaign.
Read more: Who is new health secretary Therese Coffey?
Commenting on the appointment, the BMA called on Ms Coffey to improve the NHS pay offer and ensure money was not taken from health and social care.
Council chair Professor Philip Banfield pointed out that ‘Ms Coffey takes office at a time of greater crisis in the NHS than any of her predecessors’.
After the NHS ‘went into the pandemic on the back foot, and now, with pressures left to worsen, staff are being put in the impossible situation of deciding who gets care and who doesn’t’, he added.
Meanwhile, ‘GPs are drowning in red tape and debilitating workload.’
‘Enough is enough. Things must be different this time, and the Government must now work with the medical profession and its trade union to effect concrete change for the future of the NHS and its patients,’ he said.
READERS' COMMENTS [2]
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Poor ol’ Therese Coffey seems to be such a poor advert for health, why is she the new Health Secretary?
She appears to have extreme overweight condition, must be a name for it, has she got some medical explanation for it
or is she just comfort eating, and perhaps because she wishes she was in the Labour shadow cabinet instead, who knows?
There must be lots of NHS clinics she could attend which could help her to lose a chunk of weight.
Footnote: after graduating she worked for Mars for a time, so did she receive some free confectionery as part of her package?
Possibly someone who at least looks a bit more streamlined would do better in this important role as Health Secretary.
She can smoke, drink and eat what she likes, provided she can magic up the fabled 5000 GPs, increase investment in Primary Care and prop up partnerships.
Alas, with endless billions hosed away on pointless lockdowns, prolonging an unwinable war, and paying peoples’ fuel bills without windfall-taxing multinationals’ mega-profits this is totally unrealistic.
Expecting lots of blue-sky unfunded promises to the public re more same day GP appointments, followed by a volley of verbal abuse when politely point out that you can’t squeeze a quart from a pint pot, especially when the pint pot has already shrivelled to a half-pint pot.