On hold for doctors. WTAF?

[RadioactiveWear]

Jesus.

I rarely use a doctor, thankfully.
It’s a Wed late morning, and I’ve been on hold for 45 mins in a queue to ask for an appointment.

WTF?

Last time I called, I redialled over 200 times before I got to speak to someone! Kept getting the engaged tone. It’s like you get to 8.30am and you’re competing with thousands of other people as to who can hit the dial button fastest 😡 😡

They could do online bookings. No staff needed to monitor those bookings.

There has to be a triage system otherwise you'll just get the same people booking every day - like the ones who used to go and sit in surgeries for hours on end pre-covid

@Skodacool ring 111. Tell them you need to see a GP but can't get an appointment. GP surgeries have to keep a certain number of appointments available for 111 referrals so can often get you seen same day that way.

Sorry, assuming you're in England

I haven’t used our local one, but a colleague who is registered at our practice has said that in order to get an appointment they had to:

1. no econsult available
2. ring surgery to be refused an appointment.
3. went into the surgery and was refused an appointment.
4. rang 111 to be given an appointment
5. turned up at appointment to be refused to be seen
6. rang 111 to be given another appointment and told to put in a complaint regarding the surgery.
7. turned up for the appointment, to be refused, then they asked for the complaints procedure and was allowed their appointment! They were I’ll enough at this point to be sent directly to a and e. This all took a week. The same surgery keeps sending out requests for home blood pressure checks and says that you will be asked to make a dr appointment if it’s deemed to be high. Cannot see how you would begin to get an appointment, let alone how it would help your blood pressure by attempting to get an appointment.

No you assumed wrong, stop judging when you have no idea of others lives. I am speaking of my own experiece. There is no need to be so defensive!

I totally agree

It is really annoying, everyone has to go on at 8am for a limited number of appointments!

I have found that with a baby under 1 we have always been seen the same day if we call before midday - so I'm thankful for that at least!

Yes. That's the imposed contract. With the same, already ludicrously stretched resources, we're meant to pull better services out of a hat. How exactly would you suggest that we do that, if the number of calls in the first half hour of the day exceeds the capacity of the staff available on that day

Some surgeries have more resources than others. So share resources and work in partnership with other local surgeries (two of the three surgeries in my town work together, and they offer an out of hours service with the third).

Have three levels of appointment with a GP - same day, urgent (same week) and routine (whenever you can fit them in, might be in six weeks but at least they can see you).

Do the same with the nurses

Give prescriptions for longer, so people don't have to keep coming back for repeats. Have an efficient repeat prescription system eg using the NHS app. People get told they can't have a repeat without an appointment, but nobody will see them. You just can't do that. There has to be a better way like the next point.

Use e-consult or similar for easy things that just need medication or a referral, or you can decide to phone or see the person. If you get rid of the extraneous twaddle at the beginning (do you have covid etc) you can read it in 30 seconds and probably deal within 2 minutes.

I am not saying that you will meet demand. But it will at least look like you are doing something and you are not just saying no. At the moment it's often "no we can't help and we aren't going to try". And by having other options you might reduce demand anyway.

I also think a drop in session once a week for minor stuff would hoover up a lot of people. A nurse could do it and refer if they find something more serious.

Use e-consult or similar for easy things that just need medication or a referral, or you can decide to phone or see the person. If you get rid of the extraneous twaddle at the beginning (do you have covid etc) you can read it in 30 seconds and probably deal within 2 minutes

Two examples: my mum used e-consult because she had a dodgy lump on her back. Sent a photo. Asked for a referral. The GP actually called her in to see her, but could have done the referral as well - it gave the GP control but my mum got dealt with. If she'd phoned in, she would still be waiting.

My husband did similar to get a referral to a specialist about his knee. GP phoned and then wrote referral. Again, the GP had control over the process, but my husband had his referral within the week.

Yes, this. Plus presumably, a lot of those people are also unwell at the time so even more impossible. Given you’re also basically competing in a lottery to get an appointment that is then quite likely at a time you can’t attend.

A lot of surgeries only offer the 8am phonecall lottery, no e-consult.

I always contact my GP through the NHS app. It's much more convenient and they always ring back later. If it was urgent I would probably use 111. It's much better than the old days when we had to turn up and queue before the doors opened or spend ages hanging on the phone.

I had to ring for an appointment on Monday (always a heavy day as you have all the 'I can wait until after the weekend' calls - like my own!)

Anyway, we have a call back system so you can log your number for a call back if the queue's too long. I rang at 8am, logged a call back and got one at 8.35am. So I knew I was unlikely to get an appointment that day. However, I was lucky and was offered a phone appointment. Which I took as it was a medical issue that is on record and I just needed to escalate it which is what the GP told me to do if it didn't clear up last time.

I said to the receptionist I was pleased to get the telephone consultation as I really thought I'd missed the boat that day. She said they'd dealt with 144 appointment requests in that 35 minutes and she could see 61 waiting to have a call back. Four years ago you pretty much were guaranteed to get a face to face appointment the day you rang.

Do please contact your Patient Participation Group (PPG) and raise all of your queries. That’s what this Group is there for. Otherwise, they will assume all is good when the GPs update them.

You're right in that the comparison is silly, but there's nothing offensive about the term '3rd world country'.
I know it's 2023, but lets not let any more over-PC nonsense take hold!

The issue at the heart of most if not all of the issues in the NHS is staffing. There are chronic shortages of GPs, and whilst they aren't directly NHS staff the amount practices recieve for their services is dictated by the NHS contracts, as are the training hoops and all of the excessive governance. Reality is that you cannot magic more out of thin air, there needs to be investment in attracting more to be GPs and retaining them. People have a view that they're lazy and overpaid, well then why aren't people scrambling to be GPs? Why do so many leave?

Whilst some apps can be made online without causing mass issues (bloods etc) you absolutely couldn't open it up and it not cause problems. Receptionists get a lot of flack but really their job is ridiculously hard. Calls for apps always outstrips the numbers of apps- sometimes even ten fold. They have to make hard decisions or be honest when there aren't appointments- where are they going to magic them from?

The government have made the NHS as a whole a toxic place to work with pay poorer than contemporaries across the globe, and rightly lots of staff have had enough. We should all be fighting to preserve free at point of use healthcare, I suspect staff and swathes of people would be better off under a hybrid model though, but can't even comprehend the level of moaning if people actually had to pay a reasonable amount rather than just their usually low contributions via tax.

Who do you think looks at an online booking and decides where that booking is best to go - dr, nurse, paramedic, ANP, social prescriber, pharmacist?

Hint - it's the same staff that are on the phones. more eConsults = less of us available on the phones

Well that sounds terrible. I'm not sure that's a positive at all.

And this is the GPs fault?

The whole of the NHS has been starved. Ambulance services, hospital care and GPs.

Use online consultation? Usually the most streamlined way.

If it's urgent call at 8am tomorrow, or 111 earlier if it can't wait til then.

Let's not bring logic into this! Can you imagine if the public were able to book appointments online with zero triage? It'd be carnage.

Most are working from home, too busy writing notes or signed off work with "stress".
Quotations as when people write about anything work related they don't like, a lot of advice on here is to get a doctor's note.

I don't like my boss, eff her, get a doctor's note.
My manager won't sign off my leave, eff him, get a doctor's note.

My hamster died and have no leave left, eff them, get a doctor's note.

Literally all the time.

It’s a piss take. They tell you you’ve got to call at 0800, then when you do it tells you you can’t be presented to the queue because the system is already at capacity. This goes on with you pressing redial every few seconds for about 45 minutes, then you finally managed to get onto the queue, but when your call is answered another 45 minutes later, there’s nothing left and you’re told to call again tomorrow morning.

things have only been this bad since Covid. They can’t tell me GP provision hasn’t fallen massively since the beginning of Covid, because it’s bullshit and we’re not stupid.

I said the GP rang for an ambulance. I didn't say it was the GP's fault. The thread is about waiting.