‘Call at 8am for a GP appointment’

[purplepufferfish]

I work for the NHS and personally understand the stress that the service is under. I get it. But does this frustrate anyone else?

Call for a GP appointment. Get told that the nearest one is two weeks away and to call back the next day at 8am for a same day appointment.

Call back at 8am the next day, as is everyone else of course.

Finally get through at 10am to be told that the next appointment is two weeks away and to call back at 8am for a same day appointment!

Again I know that this is no one’s fault and I genuinely blame no one for this.

Am I being unreasonable for being frustrated?

@ClearMountain

I know we are so lucky to have free GP care I’d actually prefer if it wasn’t free. Paying a nominal amount would discourage the time wasters.

I agree

I felt as if I was being ungrateful for the service

You don’t need to keep adding these kinda ‘but ofc I’m still so lucky’ caveats. The NHS on the whole is a great privilege for the country, DH is an NHS doctor so trust me we ‘get it’.

However, some bits of it are also shit , overstretched, badly managed and not fit for purpose and it’s ok to identify that and call it as it is the NHS isn’t really ‘free’ we all pay for it so you’re allowed to have a reasonable level of expectation without being ‘ungrateful’!

You sound like you’re being totally messed around! GP’s having ‘minimum 2 week waits’ is the main reason A&E’s and out of hours are always bursting at the seams. I know they’re ‘trying their best’ but whilst they get to close their doors at 5/6pm and on weekends, those 20+ patients they ‘couldn’t fit in’ just end up at the hospital demanding care from even more over stretched services.

As it stands, although over stretched and still working very hard, GP’s have a pretty cushy deal compared to their hospital counterparts, though I doubt that’ll remain the case once contracts are renegotiated.

Same here. It's rubbish. No concept that some people have to actually work and commute! There is also no in-between option. It's either same day or three weeks time. Most things can wait a few days but not three weeks!

The best I had was a patient who couldn't use the phone and had to make the appointment in person due to communication difficulties. The surgery were insisting he phoned or used the online booking. He couldn't do either. I ended up having to write a letter for him explaining the problem. If a GP surgery can't bloody support someone with disabilities (knowing their full medical history) then who can?!

My GP surgery is similar we have to call at 8.30am which is a pita as I'm walking the DC's to school then. I have to start the call at 8.27ish and keep dialling.

On the plus side with covid they now do initial telephone triage service and I can text photos so I haven't actually needed to go into the surgery now for a year. This also means they can offer more appointments as telephone appointments are often quicker (also find the same in my line of work, face to face meetings with clients always last longer)

My GP have a similar system, except you can't even book for 2 weeks in advance. Same day only, call at 8am. Awful.

They do really try to get you a call back if there are no appointments, but the call lists are usually full by 10 as well, so if you're ill/injured later in the day you're out of luck.

My partner tried every day for a week to get an appointment for what he suspected was tonsilitus and got told every day that he wasn't really that urgent, could he wait until tomorrow? I ended up booking him into a private GP through my work scheme. He was on 2 types of antibiotics for 2 weeks, and the GP was tempted to send him to the hospital it had got so bad.

When you do get an appointment they're absolutely fantastic, the nurse practitioner at my surgery in particular is wonderful, it's just so hard to get to them!

Eurgh we have a similar system too so you can pretty much forget seeing a doctor if you are ill. I get they gave too many patients which isn't their fault (don't get me started on the fact that we have hundreds of new builds springing up that are just under the limit for developers to contribute to associated infrastructure). There must be a better way

But frankly the appointment systems throughout the NHS are bloody ridiculous. I mean the whole 'sit and wait for a letter' approach from the hospitals is just as bad, because inevitably it's 'sit and wait for a letter, phone them because you can't attend the appointment they have given you, sit and wait for another letter, phone again......'

One of the reasons why I haven't moved house. Rural surgery with on site pharmacy. Yesterday I sent through two requests via AskMyGP (the online triage/booking system). At 5pm I was in an email conversation with my very helpful GP who prescribed what I needed. They were also able to refer for my other request. Earlier in the pandemic I was able to go into the surgery for a face to face examination on the same day. For me, the system has actually got better over the last 12 months.
Obviously this works for me but it wouldn't work for more elderly or infirm patients. I am hoping that by keeping most of us online, the surgery is still able to provide an excellent service for them.

Totally agree. I'm an NHS doctor and my outpatient clinic starts at 8am. If I want a non urgent GP appointment I have to cancel clinic patients. I could easily phone at lunch time to ask for e.g. a non urgent appointment but my surgery doesn't let you book that kind of thing in advance. My smear test was 2 years overdue when I gave up and went to the late night GUM clinic in the City nearby to get it done and I use a private online pharmacist for stuff like the OCP. It's rubbish. I felt shitty about trying to pull the doctor card (I thought I could maybe explain that people they had referred to me might get delayed being seen because of their appointment system!) as we shouldn't get special treatment - plenty of folk are at work by 8am. But it didn't work anyway so here we are. I live rurally so there isn't another surgery to choose. Sigh.

Oh and forgot to say that if you do get through at the magic time of 8am, the result is that the Doctor will call you back at some random point in the day, from a withheld number. So god forbid you have to work. Even supermarket deliveries can give you an hour slot

@purplepufferfish

The issue that I have is something which I guess I can wait for two weeks for, at a push. But I really worry for the patients that need to be seen urgently that have to wait so long. Such a flawed system.

Our GP has operated the same system for years (though now there has been a change to being placed in a queue, which is better) but I have to say every time I’ve had to ring and it’s been an urgent issue, even if there were no appointments, the GP has called back and either prescribed over the phone if appropriate or got us to come in immediately, so I’m that regard it was fine. Very frustrating to spend hours on redial though.

Ours is like this. I don’t get it - why can’t you book advance appointments anymore? I bet only a few people want/need to see the GP the day they phone. Most of us would rather book an appointment for later in the week, and get the day off work or school.

YANBU - ours is just the same...

Ours has an on the day system and no bookable appointments in 2/3/4 weeks. You've always had to basically take the whole day off for anything and hope you get through.

You have to call at 8.30 and hope you get through. Then they give you a time window in the morning that the GP or nurse will call you back. Then they'll decide if you merit an apointment in the afternoon and if so they'll put you back to the reception to get one. There is no flexibility on your appointment time though - you just get the first one available and if it's not suitable you have to call back and start again tomorrow.

I had to argue with them recently that me saying I couldn't make an appointment in 10 minutes time when I live 20 minutes from the surgery is not "declining" an appointment. Thankfully the surgery manager saw sense when I had to speak to her about it.

It's an awful system. I'm not blaming the GPs here, who I suppose need to have some sort of way of dealing with the deluge of patients each day (although I would have thought a triage system would be better than phone lottery) but it just pushes people into the move resource intensive bits of the NHS, either because they have an emergency that day or because their non-emergency problem escalates to emergency before they even get any care. I live in Germany and I can think of 3 times with me and the kids in the last few years where a 10 minute short notice appointment at the GP prevented us from needing hospital care.

So fwiw at our surgery
8.00 for same day.

Bookable appointments 2 weeks.
but they also:
Will guarantee that you will get seen if you have a child under 8
Have a Senior Nurse/Proscriber who is a lot more available than the Drs and is brilliant
They keep your details and ring back if there are cancellations during the day
AND have online booking available also at 8am daily and up to 2 weeks in advance.

As a family of 5 we have never ever not once been unable to be seen quickly in 17 years.

Really, it's typical captive audience behaviour.
No one likes it but what can you really do? It's all you've got unless you've got money.
The same with local authorities and the police etc.
This is why it is important to make your feelings known and encourage others to do the same.

No way! It’s alway been like this!
Not around here it hasn't.
When I moved here 14 years ago it was easy to get an appointment.
Service has declined over those years to the point where it's almost impossible to get an appointment now. The online booking system I used to use is hopeless - it won't let you book more than 2 weeks ahead, but because there are no appointments available in the next two weeks you can't book at all , which means you have to play phone lottery.

@AllDoneIn

YANBU at all. Ours has the same ridiculous system and a gatekeeper receptionist. We actually as a nation need to start complaining about poor medical treatment. Nothing seems to work around working age people. Covid has just given them the excuse to see as few people as possible.

I couldn't agree more There seems to be a British attitude that doing anything other than clapping the NHS is worthy of being sent to the tower of London. And as for "it's free" yes, at the point of use, but we all pay for it in tax. So it's not entirely free. We just grin and bare it cos of that whole "it's free" thing. I saw a comment thread years back because a woman had sued the NHS as her son's birth and delivery was so badly mishandled he had life changing injuries requiring life long care. So you'd be forgiven for thinking she had every sodding right to sue. The comments though! Horrifying! All sorts of "you'd have been charged thousands in the US, how ungrateful" "what a callous woman, people will suffer now because the NHS is paying her to look after her own child" and so on and worse. We do indeed need to start asking for overhauls.

It's bonkers isn't it. You can only make appointments at my surgery if you call at 8am. I start work at 8.30am and leave the house just before 8.

You have to tell the receptionist what you want the appointment for too, and then wait for a call back from a GP. Usually this is OK, but a while back I was struggling with a mental health issue and didn't see the Dr for ages because it was hard enough opening up to a Dr let alone casually telling a receptionist. I imagine this extra barrier is a problem for a lot of people.

I get so frustrated with my GP service (or lack of) that I try my best not to go. We have a triage system which is great in theory, except you spend hours trying to speak to reception - then you need to tell them your intimate problems, a GP will call you back that day but can't give you a time so if you are working there is no point as it ends up like a game of cat and mouse. If you can't answer your phone they ask you to call back, you can't get through, when you do the GP is busy. So infuriating! I work in a hospital and can't answer my phone most of the time. I recently spent 3 weeks on and off trying to call regarding something that could potentially be quite serious and it became such a farce I nearly gave up. In the end I have been referred to hospital for tests so I'm glad I did persevere but my God was it stressful. I went in to the surgery to be seen and they had NO patients. NONE. They seem to be running very differently to the rest of the NHS at present as I am easily seeing over 100 patients per day in my department. I am not quite sure why it's being allowed, same with dentists. Cannot see them for love nor money but come on in to your local hospital no problem!

So by your own admission you can wait for two weeks, you don't need a same-day appointment then. Ok you say "at a push",

This system works well when people realise same-day appointments are for emergencies only, things that cannot wait should be booked via routine appointments.

At my old surgery you could queue outside at 8:30 so people did that and called on their mobiles at the same time

I once started calling from 7.59am to be told "line busy" then continuously called for about an hour straight, think it made obout 65 calls.. got through.. all appointments had gone!

My old GP surgery was like that, absolutely crap service. The surgery I'm at now use an mobile app, it makes things so much easier. You either get a phone call the very same day or are invited to see the GP if necessary.

This is one area in which covid has actually improved things. Previously, we had the same thing with the local surgery - my record was 143 attempts to get through to be told there was no appointments. Now, all appointments are phone first with a gp and if required, you get an in person appointment. They have even set up an app so you can book your phone appointment online for those able to do so. But if you're stuck with the old system, it's utter hell and you can really suffer whilst waiting