Accessing Healthcare on a Zero Hours Contract

[JockTamsonsBairns]

I'm a full-time care worker, doing domiciliary care on a Zero hours contract.

For what it's worth, I've been doing this for nearly 30 years, and I adore my job.

However, I need to try and get a GP appointment for myself - and I don't know how I can do it?

My surgery asks that we ring up at 8am for an appointment. I can't do that? I'm with my elderly client at that time.

I've tried popping in at around 2pm on my break, but I'm not allowed to make an appointment at that time.
I'm told I need to phone at 8am.

The only way I can phone at 8am, is to make myself unavailable for work?
So, I would lose my entire day from 7am until 10pm.
Even then, I couldn't guarantee an appointment.

Is there a solution to this that I'm not seeing?
I can't risk losing an entire 15hr shift, on the off chance that I might get a 10 minute appointment (or not).

Am I being unreasonable to think this doesn't work for ordinary folk?

I feel for you Op i used to be in the same situation, you could only get an appointment if you rang at 8. No guarantee and sometimes be on hold for 40 min trying to get through to be told all the appointments are gone. I didn't get sick pay so it would mean losing a days wages and not even getting an appoint. Luckily ours have moved to econsult but ours still impossible to get a face to face appointment . Is there an urgent treatment centre near you? You could get try on your day off?

Getting a choice of GPs? You're having a laugh.
I'm with you OP. Luckily our GP brought in an eConsult service which I can use for non-urgent appointments. Same day has to be via the 8am route though.

Our surgery is similar, we have to submit an online form between 8am and 9am which will be triage then we may or may not get an appointment.

Most people are travelling to work at that point, so do you stay home and hope you get one or what?

I've only had to do it for DC and they were suck and off school so fine. Not sure what to do with something more routine that will probably not make the triage on a busy day.

OP, if anything your work schedule is more amenable to being able to access healthcare, because you have a day off in the middle of the week! I work Mon-Fri in a clinic seeing patients from 8-5. There's no way I could ever make an 8am phone call. Ditto the teacher who posted upthread. Or people who work in customer facing roles in retail. Etc, etc. There are hundreds of jobs where you can't make a phone call at 8am.
But you are in the fortunate position of having am entire day off in the middle of the week! Personally I would be using that day to do all the life admin that other people struggle to do at the weekend. Going to the GP, the post office, the bank...

Bottom line is - it shouldn't be this difficult to get a same day appointment. The system is broken.

How are you getting £3.80 an hour? That doesn’t add up

A 15 hour shift - each day.
surely only 3 days a week as that a 45 hour week as it is.

15 hours a day for 5 days is a 75 hour week !

I managed a Domiciliary care service. If one of my carers needed some time out for something like this we would just take a call out of their rota so they could make the call, and get another carer to cover it.

I’m a community carer too. She’ll be getting a break between lunch and tea calls and doing about 10 hours of actual work to be getting £130 a day.

YANBU I’m a teacher with complex medical needs and find it impossible to get an appointment as I can’t ring my GP at 8.30 then stay on the phone in a queue for 3/4 of an hour makes my blood boil!

Yeah but you don't get a day off in the week do you?

I'm sure if you did, you'd ring then?

Quickly 🤣🤣🤣🤣

I wish my surgery did this but no, it is 8am or nothing. If you try late morning onwards it is just ‘ no appointments left, try again at 8am tomorrow’.

I changed surgeries because of this crap

I’m a Dr and can’t phone then, and couldn’t go on a day I was working. I have to do it on days off. I agree it’s annoying - but I can also see a very very large number of people can make a phone call at 8am.

Some of my annual leave is spent doing ‘maintenance’ stuff like appointments and car servicing and so on that just doesn’t work with my hours. Like a lot of people.

the idea behind phoning at 8am is that you expect to get a same day appointment and so not working on that same day is going to happen anyway.

Whether ppl actually get a same day appointment most the time I wouldn't know.
My old GP had an online system where we described our problem on a website form and could request option of a GP call back as the 'appointment'; then we would be emailed with a time window when they would phone, sometime in the next 5 working days. That system wouldn't work for OP either, obviously.

My surgery offers evening appointments to those who have rang at 8am but are at work.

Other than that they try to fill up from the morning onwards.

@JockTamsonsBairns if your 7 am client is a regular one of yours can you seriously not just explain to them that you need to phone the GP at 8 , call in and get in the queue and have your phone on speaker whilst you work and then just drop off for a couple of minutes whilst you take the call when you eventually get through . I would imagine most people would be quite happy with that .

Why would anybody work for £3.80 an hour? That’s your real problem here.

Ok so you like your work and it’s very necessary but a) it’s a luxury you can’t afford because it’s incompatible with living a life and b) you should not be working for such a poor hourly rate whilst your agency creams off a profit, if you have one.

If you’re independently employed this is not a sustainable job and you’d be much better off financially in almost any other PAYE job. If you’re working for an agency you’re being seriously exploited.

How do you feel about the new deal Labour has reached with the BMA relating to GP appointments, OP?

econsult is brilliant imo.

I explain the issue, get a text back telling me what they propose to do. If they need to see me, they give an appointment time & date, and if it's a time I can't do, I use the online appointment manager and ask for another. If they're prescribing meds, they send the scrip to my local pharmacy electronically and I can usually pick it up the same day. The last time I used it, they referred me to a physio and I got an appointment within a couple of weeks.

So much better than ringing them, it used to take 40 minutes or more to get through and you had to ring first thing in the morning, which wasn't always possible if I had a work appointment or was driving.

Depends on the answering system. Mine doesn’t have extra lines so it’s just a busy signal and you have to call back. I just checked and it took me 84 tries and 32 minutes to get through last time. To get a phone appointment at the end of June.

It's about learning how your specific gp surgery works

It's a really annoying system. Even the online form only works during the 8-9 window at my surgery and only on weekdays. As a teacher I can only do the consult during a half term, then they will issue a random telephone appointment for 2 weeks later at a time when I will be teaching. Then I have to ring the receptionist which fortunately I can do after school ends to explain why I can't have that telephone appointment slot so then they find me one....usually another 2 weeks away which is at a time I can actually do. So it takes a month to get an appointment.

@JockTamsonsBairns on a day and at a time when you are able, call or pop in to your GP and give permission for a family member/friend to speak to the GP on your behalf. That person can then call at 8am and make an appointment for you.

It sounds like the problem is that the OP has to jump through several incompatible hoops as even if she can phone at 8 am, she doesn't know if she's going to be successful and if so, when, so she's gambling a day's pay against the unknown likelihood of an appointment at a time she can make, which may or may not be on the same day - many GPs won't allow people to make appointments for other days, which is ridiculous for non urgent conditions.

The changes the government say they're going to introduce sound great, but when are they going to happen? Why does everything have to take so long? A rule on when an appointment can or cannot be made can be dropped instantly, surely? All it takes is for GPs to say 'from now on, people can call at any time and make appointments for any time' and just do it. So why is the OP still having this issue 3 months later?

But obviously the other issue is that the OP is in a career that's illegally exploiting her. If she's effectively available for work for 15 hours, she should be paid for those hours, so at least NMW for 14 hours a day, assuming an hour's break although there's also obviously the question about whether she needs to work so many hours - that's no life and a big part of the reason why she can't get a GP appointment.

OP do you need to work so many hours, or are you choosing to? Is there any chance you could change employers for better hours and pay? Do you get paid holidays, which I think you should do even on a ZHC contract. I don't think they're allowed to roll holiday pay into your hourly rate any more but it's a basic expectation that you're paid at least NMW for every hour you're required to be at work, including travelling between clients, but excluding reasonable breaks, which are more like 1 hour a day, not 5 and you get at least 28 days paid leave a year, although that would probably be for a standard 7.5 or 8 hour working day.

But whichever way it's worked out, you're being woefully underpaid for the time you spend at work so you should really look at whether there's anything you can change to improve this.