I'm just wondering how prevalent this is or whether it is a purely local issue to us. ..
My daughter was sent home from school at lunchtime with an asthma flare and having followed her asthma action plan I realized that we needed the same day GP appointment. I rang the GP practice and after 30 minutes on hold I spoke to a receptionist and explained the issue and was told that they had no same day appointments and that I needed to ring 111.
I called 111 and after some more time on hold I spoke to the initial assessor who then arranged a clinician call. The clinician called very promptly but having run through the same set of screening questions they told me that my daughter needed to see a GP face to face the same day and that I needed to call my GP practice back.
I called the GP practice back and after another 30 minutes queuing I spoke to a receptionist and explained that 111 had asked me to tell her that they wanted my daughter to be seen by a GP that afternoon. The receptionist was refusing and saying that this wasn't possible as they had no spaces and that I needed to call 111 again. I put my foot down at that point because it was clearly not acceptable to just be push backwards and forwards between services. She agreed (very reluctantly) to send a message to the duty doctor who thankfully did agree to see my daughter and having examined her prescribed steroids.
Anyway after posting about it in a local Facebook group I have discovered that this has happened to a lot of other people locally using the same surgery or other local surgeries. And I guess I just wondered if it is very much a local geographic issue or if it is much broader than that?
It just felt really hard to be in this strange game of hot potato between services with no one taking responsibility.
I didn't feel that the issue was bad enough to need a trip to A and E but I equally knew that my daughter was likely to need steroids. I can see why A and E ends up overcrowded if people are just not able to access GP level care