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Family Doctor Services

I can help the hon. Lady on that point. One thing that polyclinics will do, for example, is to be open 12 hours a day, seven days a week. Virtually no GP practices are open for such hours. Secondly, polyclinics will provide services such as radiography, blood testing, ECGs and all sorts of facilities that are not available in the vast majority of GP practices—nor are they likely to be. Polyclinics are a model that will, we hope, keep patients away from acute hospitals and prevent long queues forming in accident and emergency made up of people who have no need to be there. They will enable those people to be looked after in a much more comfortable setting much closer to their home. On the transport issue raised by the hon. Lady, people will travel on average far shorter distances to reach such services than they have to under the district general hospital model.