See the doctor in the morning, GPs tell patients – we get too tired later in the day

PATIENTS should seek a morning appointment with their GP, or risk seeing an exhausted professional prone to bad judgment, doctors said yesterday.

The British Medical Association (BMA) is calling for a limit on the number of patients seen each day, and plans a vote on possible industrial action if numbers are not capped. “Decision fatigue is the concept that as we make more decisions during the day, they become less and less good quality,” Rachel Ali, a GP from Devon, told a conference of her colleagues. “I know that I would much rather be one of my first five patient contacts of the day, than my last five.”

Tired GPs were more likely to make bad decisions, or to find themselves unable to choose the best course of action for a patient with worrying symptoms, doctors said.

Dr Chaand Nagpaul, chairman of the BMA’s GP committee, told The Daily Tele

graph: “When GPs are trying to listen and care while juggling huge numbers of patients they want to practise safely and not to make a mistake but you are trying to do the impossible.”

GPs will be balloted on their willingness to take part in industrial action in protest at recent NHS plans, which promised family doctors “golden hellos” of up to £20,000 for working in unpopular areas, 5,000 extra support staff and a 14 per cent rise in funding. The plans were welcomed by the BMA when they were announced last month.

Doctors said they were often forced to see 40 or 50 patients a day, despite guidelines suggesting a safe limit of around half that. Joyce Robin, of Patient Concern, said: “Once you set a limit, where do all the patients who can’t get to see a GP go?”