It is demand far-outstripping supply and it scares me to death.
I worked in a very busy, inner-city GP Practice. 7000 patients with 6 GP's, 3 of whom were part time.
There was never enough appointments to go round. They introduced a triage list where 'emergencies' who couldn't get an appointment that day were able to ask for a ring back, but some days this would reach up to 200 (if it were around the 100 mark a comment would be made that it was quiet). After a few months, the doctors had to state that you could only go on the triage list if you rang between 8am and 9am. Patients would start phoning at 8am and be on the phone up to an hour. All admin staff were drafted in to answer phones for the first hour but still the phones were ringing off the hook. Patients would be queuing out of the door from 7am to be first in the queue for the window in the hope they would get offered an appointment. All appointments would be gone within 7 minutes and then the best we could offer was triage list. Every phone call was a constant "argument" as we could never offer a concrete appointment.
The Practice Manager put the rota's on a month in advance. Each session was 16 x 10 minute appointments, one in a morning, one in an afternoon. Out of those 16 she would release four straightaway, hold four back to be released a week before, four to be released two days before, and then the final four to be released on the day.
The doctors did not like releasing appointments too far in advance because patients do not turn up - even when they get a text reminder the day before. Hell, people would manage to get a same day appointment and would still not turn up! Very frustrating.
Even my local family planning clinic has had to introduce an appointment system due to the numbers of patients turning up.
The government are just expecting all public services to do more with less :-(