GP Surgery disables online forms out of hours

[MaggieFS]

Since Covid, my GP's surgery has made the first and only point of contact for all matters an e-form via their website. Depending on what you need, they will follow up to make you an appointment, a GP will call you back, a prescription will be done etc. I think it's great and a huge improvement on staying on telephone hold for ages, or having to have a face to face appointment when all you need is a two minute phone call (phone appointments were not previously possible).

However at some point recently, they have disabled the online forms when the surgery is closed. It's driving me mad! With two small children, trying to do any sort of life admin during day times is impossible and I keep forgetting in the evening.

AIBU to think they shouldn't have made this change and you should be able to submit forms out of hours?

(And next time I get to speak to someone, I will ask them why!)

But normally you wouldn’t be able to contact them OOH. Presumably they don’t want to come in each morning to a ton of these forms.
If it’s that important then you wouldn’t forget.

Mine too. I assume its so they don't have a huge backlog first thing in the morning. But it's really inconvenient and rather defeats the main benefit of an online system.

I work for a local authority and there would be hell to pay if people couldn't send us emails out of hours. A full inbox in the morning is just normal life.

Maybe it's to stop people using them for emergencies? Unfortunately people fill in these forms and expect an instant response

If they’ve only turned it off out of hours recently, it’s very possible this has been triggered by an incident.

Maybe someone tried to use it to get help for an emergency, not comprehending that it wasn’t monitored out of hours.

I would think they have the same concerns as an out of hours phone - people call for serious issues rather than seeking emergency care. They don’t want to come in in the morning and find an online form from someone seeking an appointment for central crushing chest pain who is now dead.

All good points and you've reminded me of two things:

1. Previously, using a different portal, you could make appointment bookings online and order repeat prescriptions. (It took me some time to recall how things used to be!) That's how I could do most of what I needed to do out of hours.

1. To get to the form, you have to click past about three screens telling you this shouldn't be used for emergencies, phone 999 in xyz situations and so on.

So do stuff during office hours? GPs surgeries aren’t open 24/7.
Click past the screens.
I can’t see the issue.

Most have done this as they were getting overwhelmed and struggling to find the urgent messages among all the mundane stuff. You should still be able to phone during surgery hours.

That said, if your GP is using Footfall as their portal IMHO it’s pretty poor unless the express objective is to confuse people into not bothering to use it at all.

I have a friend who is a GP and when this system first came in earlier this year, she was complaining that Monday mornings was a complete nightmare for the practice because they would come in to 500+ messages that needed to be dealt with. So when the NHS agreed to switch it off at weekends (and then also evenings as well), it made it much less stressful. I understood this whilst inwardly thinking "but I want to send a message at a time convenient to me". Luckily for my, I'm in a job where in my lunch-break I can go online and do it then, but I know that's not the same for everyone. So absolutely get your frustration, but spare a thought for the practice staff.

So I guess the issue is it's not a great system because there's no segregation of requests. The old one for repeats worked fine. It's so annoying!