Appointments at GPs ‘too difficult’ to get

Patients are putting off booking GP appointments because they find it too difficult, according to new NHS data.

The annual GP Patient Survey also found that 72% of the 719,000 respondents were satisfied with the appointment they were offered the last time they tried to book one, down from 82% the previous year.

Some 55% of patients who needed an appointment said they had avoided making one in the last 12 months – up from 42% in 2021 – but 27% said they had not made an appointment because they found it too difficult, up from 11% in 2021.

Beccy Baird, senior fellow at think tank the King' s Fund, said :" For many of us, general practice is the front door to the NHS – hese results show that patients are finding that door increasingly hard to push open.

"GPs are working harder than ever before, yet these findings show a dramatic fall in patients' experience of getting an appointment .”

She added: "Practices can't recruit enough GPs, nurses or other professionals to meet the rising levels of need following a failure of successive Governments to adequately plan and invest in the future NHS workforce, a failure that has left GP sand patientsto pickup the pieces."

An NHS spokeswomansaid more than seven in 10 people have had a good overall experience of their GP practice but the NHS is "determined to make it easier to get an appointment, which is why the health service has invested record amounts in primary care, including offering a new telephone service which increases the number of phone lines practices have for patients."