20% of visits to city’s GPs last just five minutes
Call for standard 15-minute consultation
MORE than one in five GP appointments in the Birmingham and Black Country area last five minutes or less, it has been revealed.
The Royal College of GPs (RCGP) is now calling for 15-minute sessions to be standard so patients with complex health needs can get the right care.
But the group said doctors are working under “intense pressure” as figures show falling numbers of full-time, fully qualified GPs, and added that ministers must boost staff levels.
NHS Digital this week published figures for the first time on the length of GP appointments recorded across the country.
Across the two Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) covering Birmingham and the Black Country area, 711,032 appointments (22.1%) attended in the four months to March this year lasted between one and five minutes.
A further 873,159 appointments (27.1%) were recorded as having lasted between six and 10 minutes, while 641,276 (19.9%) were between 11 and 15 minutes.
In the Birmingham and Solihull CCG area, 22.1% of attended appointments with a known duration were completed within five minutes, while the figure was very similar in the Black Country and West Birmingham area, at 22.0%.
However, NHS Digital said that different practices recorded the length of appointments in slightly different ways, which could affect comparisons between areas.
Across England, 16.7 million appointments recorded between December 2021 and March this year were completed within five minutes – 22.7% of all those with a known length.
Professor Martin Marshall, chair of the RCGP, said GPs and their teams were working exceptionally hard and trying their best in the face of intense workload and workforce pressures.
He added: “Increasingly, patients are living with complex physical and mental health needs, which is reflected in today’s figures that show almost 40% of patients being seen for longer than 10 minutes in general practice – and more than half if you exclude those with an unknown length.
“Patients with complex health problems need to have more time with their doctor, so we can ensure they are receiving the care they need, which is why the College has called for 15-minute GP appointments as standard.
“This is not to say every patient will need this time as some simple conditions can be dealt with in less, particularly if it is not the GP they are seeing – for example, a simple blood test might only take a few minutes of a practice nurse’s time.”
A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: “We are working with the NHS to improve access to GPs, tackle the Covid backlog, and grow the general practice workforce to ensure everyone receives the care they need.”