GP surgery only had 5 appointments available on Friday afternoon- how do I complain?

[AutumnApple]

GP surgery is an absolute joke. I already have to make a complaint due to a serious mistake in my DCs diagnosis of a life threatening condition.

On Friday afternoon, the Friday before a Bank Holiday, I rang at dead on 2.00pm for an afternoon appointment as I was sent a text saying to call for a telephone consultation due to an urgent query I’d raised with them. Phone message saying I was 2nd in queue. On hold for 20 minutes! then got through and told no more appointments left! Apparently people walk in and queue up for appointments.

Thing is DH had left the surgery no more than 5 mins previously and he said it was empty.

I asked how many appointments were available as it seemed odd they’d all gone already. Receptionist kept me on hold for 15 minutes to answer this and came back with ‘a handful’.

Also could not book a normal appointment as they had not released them yet so was expected to call back and stay in the queue for an hour. Tried this morning and 33 in the queue.

Lots of people complain about this surgery in our area. It is extremely badly managed. How can I get an official body to investigate it?

Give her back her money.

It isn't difficult to figure out.

Her money comes with expectations so pay for your own wedding.

HNRTT because I'd lose the will to live but, OP. are you equating same afternoon appointments with total appointments before you've decided the practice is a joke? We have a mix of same day appointments and those pre-booked for things that people can wait a few days for, appointments for things thrown over the wall by acute, long-term, LD and chronic condition reviews, vaccinations, new baby and new mother health checks, vaccinations, seeing patients discharged from acute and home visits and end of life and the un plan-able like looking after patients while waiting for an ambulance. It's not always optimal to ignore all of those to maintain more emergency and same day appointments as some cans can't be kicked down the road forever. Sometimes colleagues fall ill and are too ill to work from home on telephone consults.

Practice nurses are brilliant, but they are also hard to recruit and an ageing workforce (40% are over 50, if I remember correctly). And they have their own patient workload. The stats I quoted above are just for GP consultations. If you take into account nurse consultations too, the national average is 7.5-8.5 appointments needed per patient per year. People are always surprised by this, but we need to remember that some patients e.g. those at end of life, may be seen several times a week, and many patients with complex conditions are seen several times a month.

The UK has a lot fewer doctors of all types per 100,000 population than most comparable countries and is particularly short of GPs. We need more GPs than most countries because British GPs do many things that, in other countries, are done in hospital or by community paediatricians (we do have those in the UK but they don't do routine care, which mostly falls to GPs).

The number of GP appointments has risen considerably since 2019. In July 2022, 26 million GP/practice nurse appointments were provided in England alone. But demand is growing and GP numbers are falling.

Your surgery is better than ours.

At least you can get an appointment. I had to wait 3 weeks a couple of months ago. Only to be told (it was to do with blood test results) that there was nothing wrong. What a waste of time.

My GP calls them "emergency appointments" and there are a limited number of them that are available for people who call at the designated time.

I accept that they might more accurately be described as "urgent" appointments, but they are still called emergency at ours. I imagine to dissuade people from taking them. The reason why GPs are slagged off is because people can't get the help they need. Yes, that is because there are too few GPs. But that doesn't help a person when they are frightened and in need of GP help. But don't worry, I wouldn't dare to call mine to help me for the issues I have. I have enough trouble fighting to get help for my mum, whose cancer results they lost for 6 months.

Ours have always used the term emergency appointment
Non-emergency appointments need a phone call still, and then you may get granted an appointment in person. 6 weeks later.

At ours they tell you off if you've not been to the pharmacy first, so much so that our pharmacy that serves the same area has written a formal complaint. It's a small little shop on a little row of shops. It's often got a queue out the door as they only have a tiny amount of staff and not all of them are pharmacists.

One told me she gets home and is shattered and they never close on time. She said whilst they can advise on certain things like blisters or coughs and colds, they had sent me there about DC and their situation or they refused to even let me speak to a GP or Nurse. She said that it was pretty obvious a GP needed to look at them.

I don't think it's necessarily the GPs, it's the dragons they employ on the desk who at ours will offer an appointment if you're mates with them but if you point out an error that's it, you are on the blacklist

We used to have a choice of 3 GP practices, but they all merged into one, along with the practice in a nearby village, so no more choice for us!

They're still all at different surgeries though, which can get confusing and you have to remember to ask which surgery to go to.

A little while ago, I didn't bother asking as I knew that the GP they named was at a particular surgery. I rocked up at the appointed time, only to be told that they didn't have an appointment for me. It turned out there are 2 doctors with the same very unusual surname, and they're at different surgeries. They're not related either.

At least we can get appointments though.

Our surgery releases 2 weeks appointments at once. If none you have to ring and try again a few days later but by then more reports from hospitals have come in with GPS having to organise appointments to share information or have arranged repeat appointments for people so half the appointments for people with a new complaints have already gone for the next fortnight

To the poster who said change surgeries, its not that simple !

OurGP and the area as a whole is one of the worst performing and over subscribed per patient, yet we have thousands of new homes being built within the catchment area who will all expect a GP. It all very well spouting shortage of housing, but there is never any infrastructure factored in