Going only by my own experience as someone with several chronic health conditions, I think there must be an awful lot of extra admin and extra time spent on things GPs do because they're required to, or they need to show they've been done to get their QOF payments or whatever it is at the moment, which supposedly increase patient safety or quality of care, but take up time and with little tangible benefit for a lot of the patients.
Like 28-day prescriptions. I know it probably reduces wastage (though there's plenty of people just blindly reorder every month regardless of need), but every four weeks they're checking through another batch of my prescriptions that I get every month and will probably continue to get for years to come.
Or the telephone asthma reviews. I have a peak flow meter, which is more than the nurse expected me to have, but the rest was pretty pointless when I know my condition and how well it's responding to treatment, and she can't do anything over the phone (tests, demonstrations, etc.) that I can't do myself. Just a waste of her time. I know for some patients it won't be a waste of her time because they may not know what things need actioning, but I've been asthmatic for thirty years and will call if anything changes.
Or e-consult forms where they all seem to be set up for people asking about a new lump or recent cough or bad shoulder or new low mood, but I actually need to address an ongoing thing or a referral or something and there's no way to get a generic/blank one. I arranged an entire referral for an assessment via e-consults and the GP texting back. Each time I do one, I have to pick from a list of predefined conditions (almost none of which are the actual conditions I have) and go through masses of questionnaires and fill in free text boxes, which presumably the GP needs to look over in case there's anything important there, but which are largely irrelevant (or I have to lie so the e-consult doesn't kick me out and tell me to call an ambulance or something, then write on there that I've had to lie in the questionnaire, which is something else the doctor has to notice and manage).
If I need a prescription medication for one of my chronic conditions that I don't have on repeat — because they remove things from repeat sharpish if you use them infrequently and you don't order them for a while — it all has to go through as a new condition, with a long econsult and questionnaires and text boxes which is all extra, when I could just put in a repeat request for the triptan or whatever and it would be there as a previous prescription for my diagnosed longstanding migraines.
This is the tip of the iceberg because I don't want to go into the details of the admin for some of my other conditions, but if it's relentless and tedious and mostly unnecessary for me, it must be horrendous to deal with on a massive scale. I understand that some of it helps avoid people slipping through the net and there will be good reasons behind all the things that cause extra admin, but there has to be a less laborious way?