Booked My First Private GP Appointment

[AutumnBudgetIsGoingToBeFun]

Can't get an appointment at my NHS surgery without alot of stress and phoning in at 8am for god knows how many days.

Tried to get an appointment a few months ago for something else and just gave up. I felt so stressed and I don't work anymore so I had time to sit on the phone trying to get through (god knows how people who have to be at work early cope).

Today I decided I was going to get help for something that has been bothering me for quite a while (although I only just figured out recently what it was having attributed it to something else). I literally couldn't face trying to get an NHS appointment and figured even if I could get through it wouldn't be deemed serious or urgent enough.

So booked today, appointment tomorrow. Booked online. Very easy. Sent form to fill in which took 5 mins just about basic details and what meds I am on, allergies that kind of thing.

I have mixed feelings.

One part of me is thinking - great I'll get this condition sorted and won't it be nice to have a 30 minute appointment with a GP rather than a very rushed 10 min NHS appointment.

The other part of me is thinking - is this the start of a slippery slope and how sad I feel when I remember how easy it was to get a doctors appointment 20-30 years ago.

It was interesting that the choice of appointments started at 20 mins for the shortest one - which makes sense given the NHS ones are too rushed so 10 mins is obviously not long enough.

You could have 20 mins, 30 mins which I booked, 45 mins or an hour.
Price £120, £150, £225 or £300.

I'll have to pay for the items as well I guess but it's a treatment which will be relatively short term rather than years and years (hopefully!)

I doubt I need a 30 minute appointment but I have plenty of other things I can ask him about.

I'm not expecting it to be any different really from an NHS appointment except it's in a nicer building and no doubt I will get the 'Hello Mrs Smith, How are you feeling today' nicer treatment that you get when you go to something private. The GP works or has worked in the NHS so I'm really just getting the same advice, just quicker and convenient to me.

I'll update after I've been for it tomorrow for anyone that is interested.

By the way did you know GP surgeries are not employed by the NHS. They are run like little businesses getting paid by the NHS for every patient they see. No doubt why they give you such short rushed appointments to maximise income. I didn't know that until recently.

wow you are very lucky. Appreciate it while you have it.

Not so lucky having cancer though. Sorry!

The new online rules only apply in England- not Wales

Well for anyone who is interested how my first private GP appointment went.

All I can say is 'money talks'

Taken early for my appointment - paid for 30 mins but probably got about 35 mins as he took me in 5 mins early.

We discussed my rosacea and he even brought in someone else who does the facials/light therapy part of business to give me all the options available.

I asked if antibiotics were the way to go and he said he'd rather not start with them as it's not a quick fix disease and he didn't want to mess up my gut flora. He also said as it's more redness I have and not acne type I probably didn't need antibiotics although I think he would have given me them if I had insisted.

I asked for solantra because I had heard good things about it. He looked into it and ended up giving me two perscriptions. One for a cheaper alternative (cost £25) which he told me to start with. He also gave me a perscription for the Solantra (cost £120 from chemist) and told me to only try this if the first one didn't work to save money. The first one is also gentler on skin. If anyone wants name of this just ask. I can't remember it offhand.

Then I asked him about what happens if I took the health MOT and discovered I had like high blood pressure or something. Could he diagnose it and then get me the treatment on the NHS. He said sort of. He would diagnose it and then he would have to start me on treatment and stabilise the condition and then he would write to my own GP to get me continuing treatment on NHS.
So I'm going to book in for this in a little while.

He looked at my skin tags on my neck and explained what caused them (overweight, skin rubbing but also my age and hormonal changes). He gave me price to freeze the lot off with his high tech 'pen'. So I've booked that in for 2 weeks time. (Cost if anyone is interested cos I have alot of skin tags, thanks Perimenopause. Approx £800 to have 35 smallish skin tags frozen off)

I also booked myself a facial which includes led light therapy and is good for inflammation of the skin alongside all the usual facial benefits.

Was the appointment which cost me £150 for half an hour worth it?

Absolutely. No question.

He was just a normal doctor (he actually works for the NHS but is now doing part time for NHS and part-time private work and I think he eventually plans to be full-time private). However he let me ramble on and didn't poo poo anything I said. He also let me ask whatever I wanted and it was all quite relaxed and easy.

I think it would be hard to go back to a rushed 10 min NHS appointment now to be honest. However since I can't actually get one i don't need to worry about that.

So Yes Doctor was working at his NHS job this morning and then into his private clinic this afternoon. I booked the appointment yesterday and he said you can normally get an appointment next day.

For me this was really worth it for peace of mind, having more time and be able to ask what I wanted. So all good.

I know not everyone can afford to go for private GP's but I am very frugal in lots of ways ie old small car, modest house although my food bills are high and so are my vet bills.

£800 for the skin tags is interesting. My friends who retired from NHS did private dermatology work. I can understand why because that's lucrative!
My husband had skin tags frozen but we didn't know the cost because the bill was sent to our health insurance...we are in Ireland and move between health insurance and the public system.

Yes I knew that as I used to work in one.it was all about the money.

Well they quoted the price on their website as the cost of the consultation which I guess depends to a degree on how long you are in for. Then they quote £30 per skin tag. I have like loads on my neck and a couple on my face.

So he gave them a quick count and said he would probably remove about 30-35 of them and the rest were too small at this stage but they would grow and other new ones might grow.

He said woman often get them in peri or menopause especially if overweight as the skin rubs. I've been overweight before when younger and never got them so there is definately an age part. I also was very unhealthy and eating badly for a few years (UPF's and too much sugar and junk) and I think that might have contributed to it too.

I am hopeful if I lose weight and continue to eat better there won't be many (or any) to remove in future. Once I get to 60 plus I probably won't bother getting them done anyway and just be a wrinkly, crinkly old woman with a ton of cats (probably dogs but you get the drift)

As I'm getting so many done he said he'd charge £20 per tag plus the consultation time. He showed me the pen that freezes them and said it cost £7K to buy plus cost of gas to operate.

I guess though as I'll be in there for about 40 mins (cos that's how long I booked his time for) so yes he is making a healthy amount of cash for that amount of time but of course he will have other expenses ie rent of premises, utilities, cost of machine, gas to operate, his time, his profit margins.

It's costing quite a bit cos I have so many but I've been promising myself for a while I'd get it done.

Next on my list after I get my rosacea sorted is to get my broken veins in cheeks zapped. Sadly he does not do this so I will have to find someone new. If anyone can recommend someone in east central Scotland who does this then please post.

I can see having a private gp with easy access is going to be quite addictive but I suppose it's an investment in myself and after caring for elderly parents for 6 years I am really needing some TLC as I look old and knackered.

I don’t think you’d have had skin tags removed on the NHS if it’s considered cosmetic work. High blood pressure is definitely something that is NHS work and doesn’t need much stabilising, just a prescription usually and your NHS GP will see this in the letter and prescribe. Or just see them directly (once you get a 10 minute appointment!).

I did get skin tags removed by NHS guy originally he was looking to see if it was malignant told me it wasn’t but if I didn’t mind you could freeze it off right there and then so I did it.

no the skin tags will get done by the private GP so I have to pay for that although my mum got hers removed by the NHS in the nineties (she also got her broken veins done by the NHS in the nineties)

I can't get an appointment - that's why I'm at the private guy. He said he would write to my GP after he had stabilised any conditions like high blood pressure and then NHS doctor would add it to my repeat perscription and I'd get reviews there as well then. As long as they call me to make the review appointment because I CAN'T GET AN APPOINTMENT !!

I'll never get away with that. I have like over 40 of them on my neck. They are horrible. Thus why getting them removed. It's this years birthday present to myself.

It's not the case that you can't get an appointment, it's just taking more effort than you'd like e.g. ringing at 8am for a few days. Absolutely fine for you to choose private but don't make it seem like you haven't had another choice, particularly when you've prioritised an appointment for rosacea and skin tags over blood pressure. I'm not having a go - I just hate it when people make the NHS sound worse than it is.

Errrr, clearly you haven't tried to get an appointment at my surgery. Great that you can at yours, but at mine if you actually manage to get through to a receptionist (unlikely) they now answer with "What's your emergency?". Zero chance of an appointment for skin tags. The vast majority of us pay a lot of money into the NHS, and then aren't able to access the service, and either go without or have to pay again to go private.

Read your original post back. Doesn't sound like you've tried overly hard and you clearly have time to call your surgery if you don't work. Anyway, good luck with your treatments.

Advertising thread, I expect.

We take the kids to a private GP (although because of the expense me and DH both take ourselves off to our local NHS GP if there’s something wrong with one of us).

It is bloody brilliant. Same day appointments, pleasant receptionist, lovely doctors who have time to have a long appointment with you, no quibbles about antibiotics etc. It is £140 a pop but worth every penny.

My own local GP is a nightmare. I regularly have to wait over a month for an appointment and I never see the same person twice. It’s always a quick in and out, “get it over with as quickly as possible” experience. I really dislike going and have been putting off a couple of things which are starting to need addressing now.

I’m another one that started using a private gp, mine is lovely, really easy to get appts with, after work etc and online booking, he was the person that helped me get diagnosed when I had issues getting appts with my nhs one and being dismissed.

We too have recently paid for our Dd to see a private gynaecologist as she was getting absolutely nowhere in the NHS, despite visits to gp and hospital consultants over 12 months. The last straw was her being told she had health anxiety and needed anti depressants
The private female gynaecologist diagnosed her issue relatively quickly and we’ve paid for ongoing treatment for 6 months, it’s been expensive but worth every penny. I wouldn’t hesitate to do it again.

That's exactly my experience too. It sometimes takes me weeks to get an appointment. It scares me a bit. I'm very healthy (as far as I know) but it's so hard to get an appointment that I tend not to make one unless I feel practically on death's door. I'm not going to be someone who 'catches' something early, that's for sure.

I'd be very interested in your experience with your appointment tomorrow; please do update!

Honestly, it really is near impossible at some.

I have a weird mole. It had changed a LOT over the past few months and looks really weird! I've been trying to get someone to take a look at it for months but I haven't been able to get an appointment. When I call up, it's not urgent enough to be seen same day; totally fine. So I ask if I can book an appointment in advance, and they say I'll have to call up the next day to do that as all afvance appointments are gone (?). So I try again the next day. And am told the exact same things. It's like groundhog day.

To make it worse, although there is a callback system (so if I'm, say, number 50 in the queue, I can press a number and they'll call back when they're ready), I'm a schoolteacher so am leaving my class unattended to take the GP call in the corridor... only to be told the above (not urgent, no appointments, call again tomorrow).

I can't believe it's such an incompetent, archaic system. Hopefully my mole is fine, because I can't imagine anyone will he checking me out any time soon!

I can ring my GP's surgery at any time and will be given an appointment within 2 days.

If I ring at 08.00 they'll give me a same day appointment.

The surgery answers the phone straightaway. I never have to hang on in a queue.

I can choose to see a GP or the Advanced Nurse Practitioner.

I can choose to have a face-to-face or a phone appointment.

This is the NHS in a rural Scottish area.

That's genuinely amazing. It is definitely not like that everywhere.

Oh, I know.
I lived in London till eight years ago.
It was getting tricky then to get seen in London.

It's a million times better in Argyll, although our transport links are very poor.

I’m jealous! I’m also in rural Scotland but a little further north and it’s a vastly different experience for me.

I think that the government should say every NHS trained GP should do 10 years full time work during their working life as a GP.

Would they be allowed some time off for maternity leave? I think 6 weeks is ample. How about those trained abroad? Can they work part-time?