Can't even phone to book an doctor's appointment anymore, what is happening?

[GPbloodyWha]

Recieved this text from GP.

Can no longer phone them to book an appointment.

So what happens? You send them a message and have to wait and hours and hours for them to decide if you're allowed to see them or not?

Is a GP sitting there reading hundreds of messages to see if they should allow a patient an appointment an improvement on their use of time??

It would work well if it ran alongside the telephone system for people who aren't tech-savvy.

All of those 'hundreds' of patients jamming the lines at 8.30 aren't all people who've suddenly developed the need for a doctor in the past 24 hours. Most of them are probably phoning repeatedly for the 6th, 7th, 8th morning in a row. It's an insanely inadequate, dangerous system, it's how red flag symptoms for cancer are being missed because people simply can't speak to a health professional for weeks on end. An online triage, perhaps operated by a nurse practitioner, would take a lot of pressure off the telephone appts system. I wish my surgery would introduce something like this.

I would find this very difficult to fit around my work commitments. I have lots of either telephone or face to face appointments in community settings, so am often unable to take calls when I'm working.

My go has been like this for years. I love it. Just fill put the firm, request either a phone call, email or f2f and they will deal appropriately. It is faster and more efficient.
I live where lots of older people live, they still call and pop on to make an appointment, the rest of us use the app. Its genuinely better than having to call all morning.

We have this, although you can ring if you want to. It's worked really well for us so far. You can submit photos as well, so they can easily triage rashes/eczema and just prescribe whatever is needed, saving trekking over to the GP.

When we did need an in-person appt a GP rang within a couple of hours, had a quick chat with me about DS and then asked us to come in in half an hour.

So much easier than having to listen to hold music for half an hour while doing the school run then be told there are no appointments left.

Our form also has a space for this where you can enter preferred times for a call back and times when you definitely cannot answer.

Our surgery implemented this after Covid and it's fantastic.
Have never waited more than 2 hours for either a call from a Dr, a text to say a prescription has been raised or a time and date for a F2F appointment
No more fight to get through at 8am can fill a form in whenever it suits
I dread having to move to a new practice

Change GPs then. I have just changed as I couldn’t get through on the phone or get an appointment even when I went into the surgery.
A complete different approach with the new GP practice. A phone call gives me an appointment when I want. When I was waiting to see theGP, a person walked in and wanted an appointment, he was given one if he was prepared to wait 30 minutes. They are absolutely amazing, and I’m not willing to tell anyone where I go to….

My understanding of this system is that if you are unable to go online to fill in the questionnaire you should be able to call the practice and a receptionist will fill one in with you.

It's a much better system, it means that it's not just about faster dialling finger first, it allows triage to be done on a larger cohort than just those who rang between 8 and 8.15 am.

We've had this at our local GP for about 2 years. It's shit. Bottom line is, nothing will get better without a change of government.

Anything must be better than the system with my surgery. We still have the call at 8am and hope you get through system. Once you get through, most people will be offered a phone call from a pharmacist, which is good for some things, but others really need a GP face-to-face. Non urgent appointments used to be bookable online but not now. Currently they are full until the end of February and call next week and hope there will be more appointments into March.

We have an elderly neighbour who doesn't have internet access at all - no smart phone, nothing. And these are people who are more likely than average to need to see the doctor!

Nothing wrong with offering a way to contact them online but there definitely needs to still be a way to ring them.

Are you sure you can't phone? At my GPs we have a system like that but you can also phone if you want to, just easier to do the internet as you avoid the queue.

The only way I can get to see a doctor at the moment is to use a private clinic and pay for it, which includes the medication. This is annoying, bearing in mind the amount of tax I pay, so I am trying to find another practice to move to however this is proving more difficult than it should be.

Personally, I think some hard and difficult decisions are going to have to be made regarding the future of Health Care in this country because at the moment the NHS is broken and simple doesn't deliver. I don't care about the politics of it, I just want to see efficient and adequate medical services available in a timely manner.

Yep agree this system works brilliantly for me. . The e consult system is great especially as I work full time and can't spend ages trying to get through at 8am when on my way to work. Also telephone consultation first which again means I don't have to take time off work to attend an appointment. If you need to be seen face to face you're then provided with an appointment.

It’s discriminatory to people unable to access the internet for one reason or another. Very ill thought out. Not to mention literacy as a barrier.

Exactly

Yes this is what ours does. I use the online form. My 96 year old neighbour phones up as she always used to and they complete it for her.

Sorry missed this but yes this is how it is at the surgery I go to.

What part of being able to still ring them do you not understand?

They will walk you through the questions on the phone, and get things sorted. But for the vats majority of people it's SO useful.

My surgery does this and it’s actually been a massive improvement. There’s no stressful hours spent calling over and over trying to get through. It is a Dr who triages the requests. I’ve always had a same day response with either a physical or phone appointment. When I had concerns regarding my DCs we have always received appointments within a couple of hours.

Our surgery has used a website called Patient Access for several years - this pre-dates Covid. You can book GP appointments, ask for a call back, order repeat prescriptions, see test results and probably do other stuff that I can't remember offhand. It's very efficient and saves a lot of time if you're able to use it. They do still answer the phones, though, from 8:00 - or you can drop in and do all that stuff at the reception desk. I would actually give them high marks for efficiency.

I'm able to put in times I'm not available for a call, you get a calendar and click on say if you are busy tomorrow then you get blocks of time, think it is 2 hr blocks and you click on the times you aren't available. You can also choose your mobile or landline. It seems to work well.

I find the online request so much better than the phone calls . Our surgery has changed from being online requests only (bought in during Covid), to being phone calls only (they said people were not seeking help when needing to book online) to going back to online again .

I prefer it as the phone system meant sitting in a queue for an hour with no guarantee of appointment / resolution at the end of it, but absolutely agree that it alienates those people who aren't able to access online - and who are often those in most need of health care too.

This is what a lot of the better GP surgeries near me use. We have the old system of phoning up at 8.30. You often have to phone 100 times or more before your call will actually connect to join the back of the queue, despite starting your mission at 8.29 on the dot. There is no way I could do this while at work so I’d either have to be so ill I was off sick or take an actual day off just to enter into the ballet, to then potentially not even get an appointment.

The online one seems like they will potentially be able to reply to people quicker. There will 100% be downsides to it and it’s hard to type all of your or your child’s symptoms into a box and actually describe things correctly at times so you may end up with the wrong advice but I do think it’s probably worth a try compared to the set up we currently have

Our surgery uses this system. It is ok in principle, however you can’t access it outside of surgery hours, and they not infrequently take it down as they are understaffed (so it must be a human triaging rather than an algorithm). They then revert to telephone. Worst of both worlds.
If you are lucky, you’ll get a call back, at an unspecified time, and if you are not able to answer, because - oh, I don’t know, you’ve got a job that doesn’t allow you to hover by your phone all day - they remove you from the list.
It’s really shit, but it is a response by GPs to an impossible workload..

My GP has had this for years and it works really well.