‘GPs should be given 15 minutes to deal with patients’
APPOINTMENTS AT GP surgeries should be lengthened to 15 minutes and limited to 25 a day per doctor, industry leaders have claimed.
The British Medical Association (BMA) suggested the changes to current to in a bid to stop general practice being “run into the ground”.
The proposals come as part of Safe Working Levels in General Practice, a report which discusses measures which could help tackle growing workload of GPs.
Appointments are normally allocated 10 minutes, meaning that some doctors see up to 60 patients a day. The BMA said the time does not give GPs enough time to treat patients with complicated needs.
BMA GPs committee executive team member Brian Balmer said: “In a climate of staff shortages and limited budgets, GP practices are struggling to cope with rising patient demand, especially from an ageing population with complicated, multiple health needs that cannot be properly treated within the current 10-minute recommended consultation.
“Many GPs are being forced to truncate care into an inadequate time frame and deliver an unsafe number of consultations, seeing in some cases 40 to 60 patients a day. This is well above the 25 consultations per day, which is the recommended level in many other EU countries.”
The report also recommends the introduction of “locality hubs” – a central facility where demand, patient lists and safe working limits would be managed for a number of local practices – as GPs could benefit from the way pressure would be taken off individual practices. Dr Balmer added: “We need a new approach that shakes up the way patients get care from their GP practice.”
An NHS England spokesman said: “How long to allocate to individual patient appointments is at the discretion of individual GP practices, based on patient need, and there are no national limits suggesting 10 minutes should be the norm.
“However, GPs are under pressure, so the recently published General Practice Forward View is substantially increasing investment and reforming care to free up GPs to spend more time with patients.”