Workload in primary care

[12daylilies]

I'm a salaried GP and I'm struggling with the workload. As there can be so much variability between practices, I was hoping to establish if my workload is typical. I am wondering whether I would benefit from changing practices, or do I need to leave primary care?

I currently do 25 telephone consults in the morning and 15 telephone consults in the afternoon. Urgent extra appointments get added to my afternoon list, typically around about 5 patients a day. However it can be a lot more when on call. I am on call once a week. I have to convert about a third of the telephone calls to face to face appointments, as those patients require examination.

On top of this I process blood results, prescriptions and do referrals. We are lucky that we have specific members of the team to manage home visits and process hospital letters.

All in all it makes a 12 hour day+. I try and do the best for my patients, but by the end of a long day, I haven't got that much to give. I work in the suburbs of a large city, in an area that has a reasonable amount of GPs.

If you work in primary care, please could you let me know how many patients a GP consults per session in your practice? Is this just how it is now?

Thank you for your help

Not a GP, as you can tell by my username, but wanted to bump and Let you know I had a look at our GP’s clinics today so thought I’d share what their sessions look like.

They are mostly doing telephone calls still but there are a few bookable F2F slots and any T/C could result in a F2F depending on the issue. They do their own home visits so it’s luck of the draw how many, if any, they do each day.

they have 14 x 10 min slots for the morning session, there is then a 2 hour gap for labs, referrals, quick bite to eat etc then 14 slots for the pm session.

Duty Dr has 8 slots each day from the online patient AccuRX queries (E consults are different and are converted to appointments and added to the call/F2F lists by the receptionists) but they also have 15 morning slots and 20 p.m slots. However, these are for urgent appointments rather than ‘ I’d like a chat about my blood pressure medication’ and are rarely completely filled, although it’s always a possibility.

they are sometimes in from 7:30 am until well past close but most arrive either just before or just after 8am. I’ve had patients express surprise that the Dr called them at 7-7:30pm before now. I’ve had my own GP call to discuss results at 8pm so it seems many GP’s work well beyond closing.

There is a HCP chat board. I will go and find it and post a link, you may get more responses on there.

www.mumsnet.com/talk/doctors_nurses_and_other_hcps_chat_

Thank you @HCAokay . That's really kind of you to look at your GP clinics and to let me know about the HCP chat board. I took a look and there's already a thread on there about being much happier after quiting being a GP!

28 consults a day sounds much more like what I was doing pre-pandemic. The on call list at your surgery sounds similar to what I'm doing each day.

Maybe there are slightly lighter workloads out there...

We do 5 telephone calls and 10 face to face in our morning and afternoon sessions… with prescriptions/ pathology and letters. The visits are mostly done by a visiting service, and any extra visits are done by the on call doctor.
On call is split in two- 8:30-1330 and 1330 til 1830. The oncall sorts everything urgent out- including prescriptions- and it’s usually a really mixed bag of stuff.
There are not more appointments than before, but they are taking a lot longer as patients are coming with more in the way of problems/ concerns.
My practice is good at protecting the 3 salaried GPs as they struggled so much to recruit us, so we are looked after well!

18 morning session, 16 afternoon. Occasion urgent extras ( 1 or 2 per day max, maybe only happens once a week). Admin on top of this, visits very rare (have a home visiting service). On calls cam be busier, but sometimes actually not as busy. Definitely worth looking around for different options. Maybe locum for a while to try out different places.

Agree with @Cdl84 : sounds as though you could do with having a look around and seeing what else is on offer. All of the practices locally are doing very different things.