My GP has told me that 80% of their appointments don't need a GP appointment.

More AI scans is great news imo, at least you might be able to get an appointment.
One worry though is who owns the AI. I wouldn't be surprised at all is charges for AI was very carefully calculated by tech firms to be only marginally cheaper than a human doctor sucking more money away from ordinary people and into the pockets of Silicon Valley billionaires.

GP is a triage imo all they do is make referrals scribe antibiotics etc- there are many meds they cant even prescribe neither do they do bloodtests etc they rather waste patients time and ask them to come back for an app with s nurse. GPs will be lucky to still have a job as AI rolls out, in some countries GPs are replaced by ai doctor who will scan the photo etc and refer patient to consulabt request blood based on symptoms etc

As a healthcare professional I think this is a ridiculous stance, people go to the GP when they have symptoms to work out of they need any help with those or if they should be worried. The fact 80% don't need help and self resolved is a good thing, the point of a GP is to have the medical expertise to tell those without medical expertise the best course of action. Telling someone symptoms will resolve is a skill based on their knowledge.

You get good and bad in everything - that includes, GPS, nurses, receptionist and people in general - ie patients. There are probably people that go to the doctor for things that they don't need the doctor for, and probably know they don't need the doctor. There will also be others that go thinking they need the doctor, when they don't. In the past I have gone to the GP and left having been told it was a virus and there was nothing I could be given. However, I had been ill for a few days, and felt worse not better. I was hot, shivery and my throat felt as if it was full of glass. I was on max strength strepsils and they wore off way before I could take another. I genuinely believed I had a throat infection. I had never had a throat feel that bad before, and luckily my throat has never felt that bad since. However, as there was nothing the doctor could do - some would say it was a waste of an appointment. There are some receptionists that are too officious and there are others that are good at picking up when an urgent appointment is needed. Doesn't help them to do the job properly if they have people who won't tell them the issue. They know which staff have special interests in certain areas of medicine. They also have instruction on what issues can be dealt with by a nurse/nurse practitioner. Some GPs will be more thorough than others. I can believe that there are some that want patients in and out as soon as possible, without really listening to what the patient is saying, but not all do that. About 15 years ago I had a doctor ask to do a blood test to check my iron levels because I looked pale. I can gone for a totally different reason - yes the results showed i was anaemic, and was on iron for quite a long time afterwards. Could have been much more serious if they hadn't picked up on it. More recently went to the doctor with symptoms that some may have just put down to my age and being perimenopausal. However the doctor didn't dismiss me and did full bloods, which amongst other things showed raised gluten antibodies. Two endoscopies later, I have been diagnosed as celiac. (first was inconclusive so it was monitored). The symptoms I went with were not to do with my stomach, so wasn't something I was expecting back in the blood test results. However, I know that I have been fortunate with the GPs that I have seen. I don't go at the slightest little thing, but when I have gone, I haven't been dismissed, and in some cases, the doctor has picked up issues that I hadn't even booked the appointment for.

There’s an element of this I think. It’s like a lot of public services e.g. policing. If investigations warrant treatment, there’s a will they/won’t they act on that? If they do, there’s a long wait and you may/may not get the right treatment plan (comparable to arrest, prosecution and wait for court dates, hope for justice).

plus it's often the GPs themselves insisting on appointments that aren't needed.

I've been on the pill for years - GP insists I have to go and get weighed, blood checked etc by the nurse every year to get it renewed. Why can't I just submit my own weight/blood pressure online?
Had eczema my entire life - if it isn't cured yet I doubt it's ever going to be. Yet I still need an appointment after every x amount of repeat prescriptions for cream to get them renewed again
Same with antihistamines for hayfever.
Had a minor skin tag on my face - willing to pay to have it treated privately but they insisted GP had to check it first.

None of the above were at my instigation, believe me I didn't want to spend an hour on the phone trying to get the appt and then take an hour off work each time.

This is the problem - day-to-day maladies that are not self-limiting ought to be a GP’s bread and butter. Instead, they grumble about patient complaints being too trivial for them, but simultaneously fail to recognise - often repeatedly - patients presenting with a material risk of more serious disease, blaming “the system” for their failure to refer. (I am thinking specifically of an article in the Torygraph yesterday, describing a 23 year old who endured 13 GP appointments and months of delay to a FIT test before being diagnosed with bowel cancer, and given a permanent stoma. Poor woman was clearly failed terribly in primary care).

My impression of doctors is that unless it's life threatening, they're not interested anyway. I have a couple of minor health issues, I haven't bothered going to the GP because I don't think they'd care.

I had to last year take one of my children to the doctors 3 times in a week for each different doctor to confirm my child didn’t have chicken pox and it was a skin infection. She had spots.. that looked nothing like chicken pox, but the school insisted she had a second and third opinion before she was allowed to go back.. all while marking her unauthorised.

what a waste of appointments.

But how are people supposed to know if they need to go to the GP if they don't?

He probably did, but she took no notice, as she did with me, when I told her the first time two weeks earlier. He says himself, she takes more notice of me than him!

(The three of us care for her, as she has several health problems. DH and I are semi retired, we care for her Monday - Friday, so he can concentrate on work. He deals with her in the evenings and weekends. The three of us work as a team)

If her OH is a GP, didn't they have the wherewithall to tell the consultant she wpuld need a letter and this avoid the rigmarole.

Nail on the head. That happens with DH re his bone marrow cancer. Constant ping-pong between haematologist, GP, and other specialists involved such as orthopaedics. He’s constantly told by one or other to contact someone else who of course then says no and he’s ping-ponged back. They’re incapable of communicating between themselves so DH ends up a messenger. Lots of wasted appointment time by specialists and GPs spending more time telling him why they can’t do something instead of spending less time and fewer appointments just doing it!

Had similar recently elsewhere in the NHS. It's not about GPs. It's about not wishing to take responsibility for patients because they aren't good for the budget.

We complained officially. She should complain.

Our complaint has just been upheld.

IMO, GPs would waste less time, if they didn’t keep refusing to do things! DD is pregnant and has hyperemesis. Her OH is a GP. She was admitted to hospital for 4 days, because she was so dehydrated, she couldn’t pass any urine, not to mention weeks without eating. She asked the consultant for the first line anti emetic, which he prescribed.

However, she still had severe nausea and threw up every time, at the smell of food. She asked the maternity unit for the second line anti emetic per the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists guidelines. They told her to get it off her GP. The GP refused. She went back to the maternity unit, who told her to try another GP. They refused.

I told her to write to the consultant and ask him to write to the GP, which he did. The GP then agreed to prescribe the anti emetic.

Why do departments in the NHS spend all their time, trying to pass the buck to someone else and they end up wasting three times as much of their time, than if they had just done it in the first place? It took 2 weeks of this back and forth, while DD was being sick all the time!

I live in an urban area which isn't London and I can't swap because I am not in catchment for any other practice. I am sure that London practices can work out their catchments so they are very limited too.

Like what happened to my MIL. We'd taken her to the GP a couple of times during the month re her ever worsening cough but the GP claimed to have listened to her chest and fobbed her off saying it was clear and told us to get her some cough medicine and cough sweets! We then took her again a third time as she was really struggling to breath and yet another GP just said the same. The day after she collapsed and was blue lighted to A&E with double pneumonia and died 3 days later. There was absolutely no way her chest was clear the day before, nor the week before - even the A&E consultant said the same! GP's are just fob off merchants.

After 10 days of a horrible bug I couldn’t shake off, I finally saw the GP (at the urging of a worried dd) but I just knew he’d say ‘It’s probably a virus’ - and he did.
That same night I was blue-lighted to hospital for 3 weeks with pneumonia, ABs for 5 weeks. To be fair, though, the pneumonia had only hit me like an express train that same night.

Not just rural/villages, either. In our closest town, about 50,000 people, there's a single GP practice - yes, they have 4/5 surgeries dotted out around the town, but it's just ONE practice, so if you don't like the way they operate, then tough, there's no one and nothing else. There used to be separate practices, but one practice bought out all the others in the noughties. Impossible to see the same GP twice and all the GPs rotate around the different surgeries, you can't even choose to go to your nearest surgery, you have to take what they offer you which means you often have to drive past the one closest to go to the one furthest away. It's a classic example of how the system works for the profit making partners rather than the patients.

That doesn't really stand though, especially if like most ppl with multiple prescriptions you have a pre payment certificate. My ADHD meds cost the same regardless of it being 28 day supply.. I pay around £11 a month that covers all my prescriptions.

I mean I do get what you're saying, my partner only has 1 item on his prescription so doesn't work out cheaper to do the PPC though does get more than 28 days at a time as his aren't controlled medications.

Like others with a chronic condition I'm told by my consultant that if I have new symptoms I should go to my GP....because my diagnosis doesn't make me immune to cancer etc. and so it needs checked out.

I've never had trouble getting a GP appointment, and I always get a face to face one, and this seems so unusual nowadays that I'm starting to think there is something in my notes that says I must be seen face to face because I'm high risk of something (I was early vaccinated during COVID so I'm definitely on some list..) 🤔

Perhaps this is why they seem so pissed off at me for asking them to check out a symptom that is unrelated to my diagnosis and potentially serious e.g. chest pain?

Because if it turns out not to be a heart issue, they think I wasted that face to face appointment, that I didn't ask for, and was given because it's their policy, but that's my fault somehow and I'm a time waster?

Or I shouldn't see a GP for chest pain because anyone 50+ with a diagnosis of an autoimmune disease can't also have cardiac issues?

I'm so confused 🤷

Of course it varies by areas. If there is one surgery that covers your village then who do you change to?

Its a difficult type of problem though. I don't deny London has issues...

I'm so sorry to hear this.

My ovarian cancer was only caught early because I knew something was very wrong, and I became a complete pain in the arse until one doctor, who'd just happened to have been to an ovarian cancer awareness conference the week before, cottoned on that some of what I was describing were things associated with ovarian cancer. However by that point I was "known" at the surgery, the receptionists facial expressions would visibly change when I entered, and I had a shouting match with a nurse practitioner who did urine tests and told me there was nothing wrong with me.

I'm obstinate and wouldn't back down.

Unlike a dear friend who was fobbed off with "it's probably gastro" by her doctor for TWO years, then died of stage 4 ovarian cancer. She was such a kind, lovely person, who accepted what medical practitioners told her because they knew better than she did.

I hate the fact that the only reason I didn't end up like her is because I dug my heels in and stubbornly refused to accept what I was told. It shouldn't be like that.

It was the same when I was advocating for my mum when she had dementia. But that's another story, one which left me hating the whole NHS.

Anyway, as has been pointed out, overall doctors feel fewer than 16% of consultations are unnecessary, so if any doctor imagines it to be 80% or anywhere near that they are the problem not their patients.

Yes, my late DH was shamed as a timewaster for years and they refused to do even the most basic tests. The GP wrote letters saying he was a drug seeker trying to get benefits.

By the time they finally listened to him it was too late to do the spinal cord surgery he needed, he became quadriplegic and was dead by 40.

But at least he didn't take up any more time of the NHS.