"We know patients are frustrated:" Doncaster GP lifts lid on face to face appointment struggle

Dr Emeka Njoku, who runs Thorne's Northfield Surgery, has spoken to the Mail on Sunday about the crisis in the GP system – with one young woman claiming she had to make 191 phone calls to get an appointment for her young daughter.

Dr Njoku told the newspaper: “We know patients are frustrated. It’s something we need to work on, and we are trying.”

The paper reported that the first challenge for Dr Njoku’s patients is to get through on the clogged-up phone lines, which open at 8am.

The practice’s five GPs each have 30 appointments available every day, ten of which can be booked in advance. When they’re gone, they’re gone – which means patients left on hold, or who can’t ring at 8am, miss out. That scramble is what makes patients angriest, research found last week.

Northfield’s practice manager Natasha Moore told the paper that the phone technology needs to improve. ‘Before the pandemic we had eight telephone lines for both incoming and outgoing calls,’ she said. ‘We paid £18,000 to double that during Covid, but it still isn’t enough.’

Like many practices, Northfield introduced online forms at the height of the pandemic, allowing patients to submit queries via its website. This was designed to take pressure off the phone lines. But no one wants to use them. Just four or five are submitted most days, Moore told the paper. ‘Many of our patients are elderly and just don’t like it,’ she said.

‘Before the pandemic, patients had on average three appointments a year – now it’s just under seven,’ added Dr Njoku. ‘Their needs are more complex because of problems stored up during the pandemic. All of this takes up time.’

It is a similar situation up and down the country. Seven million people awaiting routine operations – a record high – means patients inevitably deteriorate and seek help from their GP. Nationally the demand for appointments is up 18.5 per cent since 2019.

But patients regularly don’t turn up – about 40,000 per day across the UK, according to recent data. And not all appointments are necessary. One patient tells Dr Njoku about a ‘sore elbow’, while another wants to tell him their constipation has improved after taking laxatives. ‘We have patients who are lonely and just ring to chat for half an hour,’ he says. ‘One asked me if I could recommend a new fridge.’

‘We’ve tried to ease the 8am congestion by saying those requesting prescriptions or test results should ring later in the day,’ said Dr Njoku, ‘but they still call at 8am. They can speak to a pharmacist instantly if they press a button, or could see a nurse. But they mostly want a GP.’

Some of the pressure facing Northfield and other GP surgeries can’t be helped. Many of Northfield’s 10,000 registered patients are from more deprived areas where rates of chronic disease such as type 2 diabetes and heart disease are higher. But not all want to be helped.

Some have ‘no interest in engaging with us, improving their blood pressure or lowering their blood sugar’, said Dr Njoku.

The latest GP patient survey – a poll of 700,000 UK adults – shows only three-quarters say they are happy with their doctor’s service, compared with 83 per cent in 2021.

Only half said it was easy to get through on the phone, and 26.5 per cent put off making an appointment because it was ‘too hard’.

South Yorkshire is one of the areas of England where numbers of full-time GPs have fallen the most. And this causes problems with recruitment.

Dr Njoku recently interviewed a young GP who wanted £110 per hour to work only between 9.30am and 3pm. ‘She only wanted to see four patients per shift in person, the rest on the telephone, and didn’t want to do home visits because she “didn’t enjoy that” during training,’ says Dr Njoku.

Another trimmed her nails during the interview.

‘She assumed we’d have to take her on anyway as there are so few GPs – we didn’t,’ he adds. ‘Both will be working elsewhere now, as practices are so desperate.’