To think there should be another service for when GP surgery is full?

[CreatingHavoc]

Every time I need to see my gp for an urgent appointment and they can't fit me in, they always tell me to call 111 who always send me to A&E. I've spent 7 hours in A&E today when I probably didn't really need to be there because there's no intermediate assessment service, like a walk in centre, or similar. Is this the same for all areas or am I just unlucky in where I live?

@glossypeach

Lazy in what way?

@glossypeach it’s honestly attitudes like this that make me and many others want to quit.

It's ridiculous.

A friend had an awful chest infection and needed ABs.

No doctor appointments available even though she phoned 1 minute after the phone line opened. They told her to go to the hospital.

At the hospital she waited 8.5 hours to be seen. There was someone there who had been sick. (Doctor not needed) Someone else with an ingrown toe nail (should have booked a non urgent docs appointment).

People need to learn how to use the system properly. Stop demanding doctors appointments for minor things that can be treated at home! I do wonder how many appointments each day were not necessary.

It was the same until recently locally and now we have an urgent treatment centre which is great

It's not lazy - it's cost-cutting, and it's largely down to management of the companies who're buying up the well-run practices providing great service, merging them and reducing the services down to the point where - if you call more than a second or two after the lines open - there are no appointments left. That forces everybody to go through a couple of layers of triage online and wait up to a day or two for a response, thus spreading the load and meaning they can use fewer, cheaper staff to do the job of an expensive GP.

This is what happened in our town - a company came in, bought up the four GP surgeries that everyone was happy with, and reduced the service levels to the point where almost nobody ever talks to a real doctor. Incidentally, their CQC rating has been "inadequate" or "requires improvement" for three years, and there's no appetite for any kind of enforcement; if they were a care home, they'd have been shut down by now, particularly since some of the failures are outright breaches of the law (eg unqualified, un-vetted staff writing prescriptions), and they've nearly killed two of my family members with their incompetence.

The only thing you can do is try to find another practice with better management and move to it, because there's no incentive for anything to change in the current system.