Dear patients
We are writing to explain why you may experience a longer wait for routine appointments in the coming months. We are gradually implementing the British Medical Association (BMA) and the European Union of General Practitioners recommended safe limit on the number of patients our GP's see per day. This limit of 25 patient consultations, per GP, per day protects you from seeing a doctor who may be fatigued which can lead to errors or mistakes. You may be aware that a doctors workload consists of much more than patient consultations, the picture below aims to demonstrate all of the additional work that GP's carry out.
Image above shows an iceberg with a small portion showing above the water line, and a large portion below the surface.
This reads: General Practice - Work seen by certain media and patients: Face to face appointments, remote gp contact and reception contact.
Additional work carried out: Flu jabs, prescriptions, reviewing results, covid jabs, community engagement, going green, childhood immunisations, medication reviews, antibiotic stewardship, care home ward rounds, online consultations, patient signposting, managing national and local targets, mandatory training, home visits, non-nhs letters, meetings, gp training, patient reports, learning disability reports, chronic disease reviews, reviewing patient and hospital letters, safeguarding, staff supervision, appraisal and revalidation, medical and other student training, processing referrals, end of life/palliative care, 90% of NHS contracts, supervising and supporting community teams, managing complaints, CCG and PCN monitoring, HR adn staff management, Pharmacy liaison, tackling medical fake news, dealing with health beliefs, and coroner reports.
Our GPs are currently doing all of this additional work and seeing more than the safe number of patients per day. Our decision protects you from being the patient who is seen at the end of the day when the GP may not make safe decisions.
As you may be aware all of our GP appointments are booked following a GP assessment (triage) of your presenting symptoms. Comprehensive information about your condition is gathered via a questionnaire on our website called eConsult. The GP uses eConsut to decide on the timescale for you being seen so the more information given the better. Should your condition deteriorate in the mean time please re-submit an eConsult for further triage (you can call us if you cannot use eConsult).
We are aware that the service we are offering is not what you expect nor is it the service we would like to provide. We must look after our staff and ourselves and we would like more doctors. We would encourage you to contact your local MP to raise the issue of insufficient GP funding.