Gp telephone appointments

I had a telephone appointment with the GP and received a time. 10.45am.
Thought that's brilliant. Unfortunately she didn't ring until 1.20pm told
that she does her phone appointments after morning surgery.

Or when you’re on the loo. I take mine with me now!

Mine gives you a four hour window. May be two hours before or after. Or as my last phone appointment not phone at all even though they requested the appointment.When I rang the next day to see if I’d missed it even though I had my phone with me the whole time they said oh that doctor doesn’t work Mondays.Oh right so the 3 txts I got reminding me of the appointment were all wrong then

It may not be true at your surgery but unfortunately, it is at the one I work at I promise you

Oh and some GPs work from home too, so only do telephone consultations.

This is so not true.

Some GPs will have a whole day of remote consultations. Some will have a morning of F2F and an afternoon of telephone consults, or a mixture.

We use e-consult and it means your online query is assessed first thing, then either allocated a call, F2F or referral elsewhere eg Pharmacy First or the physio, MH nurse etc.

Sometimes calls are quicker than others, some don’t pick up, some take ages. The clinician can have a list of calls and decide in which order they want to deal with them. Mrs Bloggs might need to be seen with her chest pains or breathlessness so she needs calling first so we can bring her in sooner rather than later. Mr Smith sounds like he just needs a Med3 so he can wait until later. Miss Jones didn’t answer so I’ll try her again later when I can, and Mr Thingy needed an ambulance when I got hold of him so that takes a while to sort out.

We always let you know if it’s morning or afternoon though, and for non urgent calls we usually run roughly to time.

As for going home early - rarely happens. IME most GPs are there until at least 1830 when the surgery closes, usually 1900 or so, unless they’re on a half day and finish about 1400.

Totally agree.

This pisses me off too. I often wonder why if you have a face to face appointment at the surgery,you are allotted 10 minutes at a certain time,but when you get given a telephone consultation,it's any time between 4pm and 6pm? It's got to the point now where if I have a phone appointment,I barely let my phone out of my hand as I've missed 2 appointments this way because I left my phone in another room for 5 minutes and of course,they phoned at that exact moment.

🤣🤣🤣 to be fair I dont blame them.

Yes I understand and I get asked this a lot when at work. It’s the only answer I have though. It’s only so the drs can finish and go home early tbh

But i think this is what a lot of us are saying telephone appointments should be the same as f2f they shouldn't just be slotted in when the dr gets a chance. It should be an actual appointment just like if you where in the surgery.

You could ask the receptionist to change it to a face to face appt. if you would prefer that. The reason they don’t give a time for tel appts is because they fit them in between patients, so if a patient doesn’t turn up or has a very short appt they will make a call

Yes I agree with this, telephone appointments should run like F2F as closely as possible, with obvious caveats like getting through at the right time and calls running over.

Yay 🥳

Ours give a Time but they've often dont ring until 8/9 hours later. It really annoys me because if it was f2f you wouldn't be waiting in a waiting room for 8/9 hours. Telephone appointments should be treat the same as f2f.

That's very annoying, our GP practice books in a time slot but of course, this can be earlier or later than the actual booked time depending on whether they were able to get through to the other patients, or calls ran over etc. But to not have a pre booked time or even an AM/PM slot is insane!

I know i absolutely hate waiting and I dont get very good phone signal so have to be in a specific part of the house why I wait 9hrs for a call

The fear is real OP! I completely get it! If I have a phone call appointment with no rough time they’ll call, I’m just on high alert all day, paranoid I’m going to miss it. I won’t go for a shower, to the loo for anything more than a quick wee if I really can’t hang on…. Same for deliveries with no set time! Luckily work from home so it’s not such a big deal.

I get why they don’t give a time - they rarely run to schedule in person as it is! So I guess if someone doesn’t answer they might phone the next person early to give them a slot ack later on to try the first person again, otherwise they could end up with no free time to try 10 people who didn’t answer! I wonder if it would be helpful to implement a system when they give you an earliest time they’ll call - so if they have 6 people on the list for 9-10am (and these were the first slots of the day) they say “not before 9am” to you. Person number 15 would be told not before 11am, or maybe 10:30am to build in contingency for ringing early. I definitely don’t understand why they can’t tell you morning or afternoon, with the understanding that a morning call could end up being early afternoon if they get behind schedule.

Not that this helps you for today! I think, if you really need to go to the toilet you just have to go, take the phone with you, and be as fast as possible! If it rings, answer the call but don’t flush until you’ve hung up.

Good luck!

This is the downside of socialised health care. It’s not always convenient by my god are we lucky to have it.
there is an alternative. You can still take out insurance like in other countries and go private. We are lucky that we have the choice.

Have you pooped 💩 yet 🤣

I won’t accept phone calls from medical professionals anymore after a hospital appt said 4:30 and the phone call eventually happened at 6:45 - they aren’t the only people who are busy and I’m not hanging around for people . I also find it’s easier to get fobbed off or forget what you actually want to achieve in a phone call so now I request in person appts .