Overwhelming demand is forcing almost one in three practices to pause bookings

As reported by The Times, according to a survey, almost a third of GP practices have been forced to stop offering routine appointments in the past year owing to overwhelming demand

Patients are being left frustrated and distressed, GP leaders said, and a charity warned that access problems were driving people to similarly overcrowded A&E departments.

The survey of senior GPs was carried out by the industry magazine Pulse, which also reported increasing verbal and physical abuse from patients.

In June last year GPs in England carried out 25.9m appointments, rising to 29.4m this June. In June 2019, before the pandemic, 23.8m appointments took place. However, the number of permanent, fully qualified GPs in England fell from 26,859 to 26,521 in the year to June.

Rachel Power, chief executive of the Patients Association, said: “Our patient survey showed that of access to a range of healthcare services, getting a GP appointment was the most difficult. We’ve raised access problems with the NHS and government and are pleased that the primary care recovery plan addresses many of our concerns.

“Patients’ inability to get the appointments they need with their GP surgery can shift that need to other services that may not be able to cope with increased demand.”

Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chairwoman of the Royal College of GPs, said the survey made for “sad, but unsurprising, reading”. She said: “GPs want to do the best for all our patients and will only cancel routine appointments as a last resort, but the truth is that we cannot work any harder.

“We share our patients’ frustration and distress when they struggle to access our care. We are delivering more appointments overall compared to before the pandemic, yet we have nearly 970 fewer full-time fully qualified GPs compared to 2019 and there is not the supply to meet the demand.”

Hawthorne said pressures had been “created by years of underfunding and poor workforce planning in our family doctor service” and called for “urgent, significant investment in retention initiatives to encourage existing GPs to stay”.

The survey of 408 GP partners was carried out between June 9 and 15. It found that 123 of them had had to stop taking bookings for routine appointments at some point in the previous year.

One GP from Wiltshire said her practice was “as busy as winter almost, and generally [we] can only offer routine appointments in two weeks’ time”.

A Hertfordshire GP said: “During the holiday time period, only two doctors at a time are allowed to take annual leave and to manage workload we reduce routine appointments of doctors.” He said instead they increased appointments handled by other staff such as pharmacists and physiotherapists.

Dr Zishan Syed, a GP from Kent, said halting routine appointments “only leads to abuse” and said hospitals needed “to be doing better” at not passing on work such as blood tests and prescriptions to primary care.

The Department of Health and Social Care said the survey results were “misleading” because the respondents represented only 6 per cent of 6,500 surgeries in England, meaning that “fewer than two per cent of all general practices said they had to stop routine appointments at any point during the last year”.

It added: “There are more than 2,000 additional doctors in general practice compared to June 2019. We hit our target of 26,000 additional direct patient care staff a year early, have record numbers of trainee GPs and more appointments are available.”