NHS Doctors not helping themselves?

Allira

Again rude.

Perhaps you don't realise.

Direct and disagreeing with you isn’t rude.

Rude would have been calling him entitled for asking for special treatment.

Maybe you don’t realise.

Jaxjacky

We have a similar system to others e-consult, fill in and online form and await triage, it works well.

So your receptionists don't triage then?

Ours do.

We have a similar system to others e-consult, fill in and online form and await triage, it works well.

The doctors and nurses are fine, as are some of the receptionists but there are a couple of receptionists who are downright obstructive and have been caught out in lies.

Give someone a little power and they then abuse it.

We're so lucky with out GP surgery, it's excellent and we've no complaints. I'm usually seen on the day, not always by a doctor or in person but the triaging is very good so I always feel that I've seen someone suitable. My only complaint is the communication between the hospital and the surgery, I've sometimes found my hospital medication prescriptions have not got to the surgery in good time which causes a problem but the GP pharmacy is always really helpful.

Again rude.

Perhaps you don't realise.

It was the receptionist who was intransigent. Also she needed to do was ask the nurse if she could see him - yes or no. He was very upset and apologetic that he missed the time.

I wasn’t rude, I was asking you a question on why your husband felt that him forgetting his appointment was then the practices problem to solve in that moment.

Him being upset and apologetic doesn’t change the practices rules. I don’t understand why he thinks it should? If the receptionist spent all day asking the medical staff administration questions nothing else would get done.

I genuinely don’t understand the distaste so many have for those who work in an administrative capacity.

Primrose53

Allira that is similar to what happened to my friend’s husband. He had a text to say he could get a flu jab and to go to the surgery between 9 and 1 pm. He turned up at 10 to 1 and was told he could not have it. He pointed out there were still 10 minutes left but the receptionist said “we close at 1”.
They told him to come back at 2 but he said it was a 10 mile round trip again but she wouldn’t back down.

DH said to me that often, if we arrive for an appointment on time, we have to wait for at least half an hour or more to be seen anyway.
If you get called in within five minutes of the appointment time, it can catch you on the hop!

Allira that is similar to what happened to my friend’s husband. He had a text to say he could get a flu jab and to go to the surgery between 9 and 1 pm. He turned up at 10 to 1 and was told he could not have it. He pointed out there were still 10 minutes left but the receptionist said “we close at 1”.
They told him to come back at 2 but he said it was a 10 mile round trip again but she wouldn’t back down.

I was at a birthday party yesterday afternoon and on our table were locals we know well and the chat got round to our GP practice.

I think we have about 10 partners but two of them now spend a couple of days a week teaching. One of them is our named GP so no wonder we can seldom get an appointment with her.

Summerlove

*It's rare that either of us would forget an appointment but DH suddenly realised that he should have gone to see the nurse to give blood the other week. The clinic was still running that afternoon. He rushed there, about three-quarters of an hour late and the receptionist refused to let him go through. I said to him that some patients would have arrived early and so he could have been tagged on at the end instead of having to make another appointment.*

Why should people have to potentially work late because your husband forgot his appointment? I’m sure he wasn’t the only one, so should they let everyone rock up late?

This rule will be coming from the GP, not the reception staff, so no point in blaming them.

Why should people have to potentially work late because your husband forgot his appointment? I’m sure he wasn’t the only one, so should they let everyone rock up late?

No need for rudeness.

As I said, the clinic was still running, patients often arrive early (including DH usually) so one of the next patients would have gone in DH's slot. The nurse was still there taking the clinic for another hour or so after he went there. She would not have worked late and, knowing the nurses at our practice, she would have seen him.

It was the receptionist who was intransigent. Also she needed to do was ask the nurse if she could see him - yes or no. He was very upset and apologetic that he missed the time.

Older people aren't marginalised though, PaynesGrey. The receptionists will fill in the forms for them, but they have to wait to be triaged like everyone else, and some don't want to. A two-tier system would cause resentment, I think, but we did use to have 'drop in' appointments from 11.00-1.00 for all patients, and it would be great if they could be reinstated. I used them a couple of times for babies with a temperature and similar - when you want quick reassurance and even an appointment the next day is too far off.

Old Frill My surgery doesn't restrict consulting hours AFAIK. You can only send the forms in during surgery hours, and they are collected at something like 10.00am and 2.00pm. A GP, a nurse and an admin person go through them and sort them depending on what action is to be taken. I know this as I was talking to someone who used to work in the surgery and she told me how it worked.

Obviously the number of consulting opportunities are restricted by time and the number of GPs available, but surgery hours are 8-6 on weekdays and 9-12 on Saturday mornings. I hope they don't change the system, as the one where everyone had to ring at 8.00 (when people are on the way to work) and try again tomorrow if they don't get through was atrocious.

Mostly, I have used the system for important problems, so have had very prompt responses, but less important appointments do have to wait. I have only had one experience of having to wait three weeks for an appointment, but it wasn't urgent and I had specified the GP I wanted to see, so knew that I'd probably have to wait, and didn't mind.

It's rare that either of us would forget an appointment but DH suddenly realised that he should have gone to see the nurse to give blood the other week. The clinic was still running that afternoon. He rushed there, about three-quarters of an hour late and the receptionist refused to let him go through. I said to him that some patients would have arrived early and so he could have been tagged on at the end instead of having to make another appointment.

Why should people have to potentially work late because your husband forgot his appointment? I’m sure he wasn’t the only one, so should they let everyone rock up late?

This rule will be coming from the GP, not the reception staff, so no point in blaming them.

Doodledog. That sounds like the Accurx triage or very similar. I’ve experienced filling in the online form and getting a callback almost immediately to go to the surgery if it sounds serious.

I suspect one of the problems may be older, isolated folk who don’t use or are not confident with technology. I hear it from people at the twice yearly pop up Covid vaccination facility. They may struggle with phones in general through impaired hearing or the instructions to press this or that for different services, and digital technology (no mobile phone or computer). So they walk in and are upset when the receptionist tries to turn them away as all the time slots are booked.

I’m old enough to remember when one could just walk into a doctors’ surgery and wait (sometimes hours) to be seen but I’m talking about the 1960s when a lot of people still didn’t have a phone in the home and the phone box on the corner was often out of order.

I don’t like that some older people feel marginalised. It will come to all of us eventually that we struggle with some things. I think there is a place in GP practices, certainly larger ones, to allocate say an hour or two a day in the mid afternoon, after the early morning rush, for older people to be able to walk in to see someone. First come, first served.

Three weeks at our practice would be quick, five to six weeks is more like it. Even then that is usually a phone call, my doctors still won't see patients face to face if they can avoid it. I am baffled why 5 years after Covid when everything else has returned to normal, GPs are still allowed to behave like this.

Doodledog

Ours has a good system (sorry, I realise that's not what those with frustrating ones want to hear, but I mention it to show that it can be done). You go online and fill in a form with a brief description of the problem. You are guided through it with questions about how long it has been going on, what you want from the surgery (eg a consultation, a change of meds or whatever) whether it's getting worse and so on, so the triage team have enough information to work with. You can ask questions, too.

The forms are triaged twice a day and you get a call back (sometimes within the hour) to resolve it. You might get a call from a GP or nurse, or the receptionist might call to make an appointment, to tell you that your meds have been changed and will be at the chemist by tomorrow, or to pass on an answer to a question. Sometimes a GP will answer questions by text if they are straightforward. It is all very efficient.

As an example of the efficiency, Mr D had an odd-looking lump on his head, which he couldn't see, but I could. He kept saying it was fine, and put off getting it looked at, as men can be won't to do🙄. I took a photo and uploaded it to the system, said I was concerned and asked for advice, leaving his number so they didn't need to worry about speaking to me about him and breaking confidentiality. Within an hour he got a call asking him to come straight to the surgery, where a nurse practitioner said it was a basal cell carcinoma and prescribed some ointment to zap it. From my message to his applying the first lot of ointment took a couple of hours. You couldn't ask for better service.

It is so much better than the 8.00am scramble, but people still moan. The receptionist will fill in the form over the phone for anyone unable to do it themselves, but that that leads to complaints about having to tell the receptionist the nature of the problem, and people don't want to be triaged - they want to speak to a GP immediately, which is just not efficient and leads to longer queues for everyone else.

There are downsides around having to talk on the phone for patients who don't have privacy. You can't specify a time for a call back, but you can say when you are not available. Now that I am retired I don't need to do that, so can't say how well it works, but I assume they take working hours/commuting time etc into account.

I don't know whose responsibility it is to sort things out. Surgeries are businesses now, so the government can't impose systems (or can they?), but they could employ more GPs and other staff. My home town has nearly doubled in size since we moved here, but the number of GPs has stayed the same, and most of them are part-time. Things have declined over the past 15 years, so it can't be reversed by tomorrow, but I'd like to see a move towards a reasonable cap on the number of patients per GP in any surgery, and that would mean government involvement.

Many GP practices that used this system have to to restrict the hours of availability or, in the case of my GP practice, abandon it completely. People became rather too adept at using it and it generated so much extra work the practice couldn't cope. Having used it l can appreciate why, in order not to miss something crucial the submissions have to be checked regularly and quickly, GP surgeries became swamped. I hope it continues where you are, l thought it was an extremely useful tool but absolutely understood my GPs experience and frustration when it was explained.

My home town has nearly doubled in size since we moved here, but the number of GPs has stayed the same, and most of them are part-time.

The same here, a big increase in population! And full-time GPs have been replaced by the same number of part-time GPs with a few locums who appear then disappear with regularity.

Ours has a good system (sorry, I realise that's not what those with frustrating ones want to hear, but I mention it to show that it can be done). You go online and fill in a form with a brief description of the problem. You are guided through it with questions about how long it has been going on, what you want from the surgery (eg a consultation, a change of meds or whatever) whether it's getting worse and so on, so the triage team have enough information to work with. You can ask questions, too.

The forms are triaged twice a day and you get a call back (sometimes within the hour) to resolve it. You might get a call from a GP or nurse, or the receptionist might call to make an appointment, to tell you that your meds have been changed and will be at the chemist by tomorrow, or to pass on an answer to a question. Sometimes a GP will answer questions by text if they are straightforward. It is all very efficient.

As an example of the efficiency, Mr D had an odd-looking lump on his head, which he couldn't see, but I could. He kept saying it was fine, and put off getting it looked at, as men can be won't to do🙄. I took a photo and uploaded it to the system, said I was concerned and asked for advice, leaving his number so they didn't need to worry about speaking to me about him and breaking confidentiality. Within an hour he got a call asking him to come straight to the surgery, where a nurse practitioner said it was a basal cell carcinoma and prescribed some ointment to zap it. From my message to his applying the first lot of ointment took a couple of hours. You couldn't ask for better service.

It is so much better than the 8.00am scramble, but people still moan. The receptionist will fill in the form over the phone for anyone unable to do it themselves, but that that leads to complaints about having to tell the receptionist the nature of the problem, and people don't want to be triaged - they want to speak to a GP immediately, which is just not efficient and leads to longer queues for everyone else.

There are downsides around having to talk on the phone for patients who don't have privacy. You can't specify a time for a call back, but you can say when you are not available. Now that I am retired I don't need to do that, so can't say how well it works, but I assume they take working hours/commuting time etc into account.

I don't know whose responsibility it is to sort things out. Surgeries are businesses now, so the government can't impose systems (or can they?), but they could employ more GPs and other staff. My home town has nearly doubled in size since we moved here, but the number of GPs has stayed the same, and most of them are part-time. Things have declined over the past 15 years, so it can't be reversed by tomorrow, but I'd like to see a move towards a reasonable cap on the number of patients per GP in any surgery, and that would mean government involvement.

Primrose53

PaynesGrey

My practice, which serves aound 40,000 patients, reports the number of missed appointments called DNA “did not attend”. I assume other practices do too.

In August 2025, 333, or an average of 15 appointments a day, were missed.

Each appointment is for 10 minutes. 150 minutes, two and half hours a day.

This isn’t a new issue. The practice has been reporting similar numbers for many years.

Like most practices, there is usually a long wait in a queue to speak to a receptionist but there is also an online form to cancel an appointment or people could also call into the surgery to cancel. It’s an urban area.

I suspect many people just don’t bother.

I would hazard a guess that the surgery has more DNAs than cancellations and obviously, the surgery won’t know someone is DNA until they DNA.

There is not much excuse for accidentally forgetting an appointment as the surgery sends repeated text reminders right up to immediately before the appointment - unless someone doesn’t use a mobile phone which might be possible for some patients.

I believe all practices record DNAs. Ours does, but unlike yours there is no special number to ring to cancel which is crazy.

It is quite usual to ring our practice to be told you are number 10 or 12 in a queue. If you can’t get through then you can’t cancel your appt and you become a DNA.

Same here, Primrose

Nor does our surgery send out any text messages to confirm appointments.

It's rare that either of us would forget an appointment but DH suddenly realised that he should have gone to see the nurse to give blood the other week. The clinic was still running that afternoon. He rushed there, about three-quarters of an hour late and the receptionist refused to let him go through. I said to him that some patients would have arrived early and so he could have been tagged on at the end instead of having to make another appointment.

PaynesGrey

My practice, which serves aound 40,000 patients, reports the number of missed appointments called DNA “did not attend”. I assume other practices do too.

In August 2025, 333, or an average of 15 appointments a day, were missed.

Each appointment is for 10 minutes. 150 minutes, two and half hours a day.

This isn’t a new issue. The practice has been reporting similar numbers for many years.

Like most practices, there is usually a long wait in a queue to speak to a receptionist but there is also an online form to cancel an appointment or people could also call into the surgery to cancel. It’s an urban area.

I suspect many people just don’t bother.

I would hazard a guess that the surgery has more DNAs than cancellations and obviously, the surgery won’t know someone is DNA until they DNA.

There is not much excuse for accidentally forgetting an appointment as the surgery sends repeated text reminders right up to immediately before the appointment - unless someone doesn’t use a mobile phone which might be possible for some patients.

I believe all practices record DNAs. Ours does, but unlike yours there is no special number to ring to cancel which is crazy.

It is quite usual to ring our practice to be told you are number 10 or 12 in a queue. If you can’t get through then you can’t cancel your appt and you become a DNA.

My practice, which serves aound 40,000 patients, reports the number of missed appointments called DNA “did not attend”. I assume other practices do too.

In August 2025, 333, or an average of 15 appointments a day, were missed.

Each appointment is for 10 minutes. 150 minutes, two and half hours a day.

This isn’t a new issue. The practice has been reporting similar numbers for many years.

Like most practices, there is usually a long wait in a queue to speak to a receptionist but there is also an online form to cancel an appointment or people could also call into the surgery to cancel. It’s an urban area.

I suspect many people just don’t bother.

I would hazard a guess that the surgery has more DNAs than cancellations and obviously, the surgery won’t know someone is DNA until they DNA.

There is not much excuse for accidentally forgetting an appointment as the surgery sends repeated text reminders right up to immediately before the appointment - unless someone doesn’t use a mobile phone which might be possible for some patients.

Is it a case of too many patients or not enough Doctors?

argymargy

I’m not sure why you’re blaming the doctors? Did you know that the average number of patients per full-time GP in England has risen from 1,938 in 2015 to 2,257 in 2025? And we are getting older as a society with most healthcare being needed by older people. Chronic disease management is being shifted out of hospital to primary care for everyone’s convenience apart from the GPs. Funding for GPs is complicated but GPs don’t have a guaranteed income (unless they are salaried), so practices are closing because they are not viable.

Down to the government then, to get it sorted. Ridiculous I have to wait three weeks for a urine infection. Told to go to urgent care

At my surgery you can only ring after 9am for an appointment. However, you can go in person at 8am. Hence, we turn up at 8am and get one.

My surgery it tops, mostly. If they run out of same day apppointments and someone rings in very great need, unless its an A and E matter, they will make the time. ]

They understand that some people for whatever reason cant remember or has been due to the illness. MH confusion, for example, or people who are no longer "quite with us" for one reason or another.

There is also a drop in centre in town open to all where you will be seen unless you arrive near closing time - it's open 8am to 10pm at night. Big city/town advantage and as people say, regional.
I live in an attractive city for professionals to live in, makes a huge difference: and although I have specific grumbles about one GP or another, it's a benign and happy place to work in.