There is no shortage of patients sharing harrowing stories of how a lack of in-person appointments or being stuck in the endless labyrinth of phone calls and online forms has damaged their health.
Appointments don’t always come quickly either. While almost 150 million patients were seen on the same day in England in 2023, 17.6 million were seen at least a month after the patient booked them – or one in twenty.
So what’s behind the crisis? MailOnline’s series of fascinating charts explain the ins and outs of why you can’t see your GP when you want to.
The number of general practitioners is stagnating
There are now on average more than 950,000 GP appointments per day in England – an increase of over 40,000 since 2018/2019.
But despite this undeniable increase in demand, the number of GPs working in the NHS has effectively stagnated.
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More and more doctors are reducing their working hours and taking early retirement.
Some leave due to increasing pressure to the private sector or abroad.
While the number of NHS consultants grew by 18 per cent between 2016/17 and 2021/22, the number of GPs increased by just four per cent over the same period.
Ministers have quietly reneged on a promise to hire another 6,000 GPs, which was a key part of Boris Johnson’s election-winning manifesto.
Since 2019, only 2,000 general practitioners have been added.
Instead, the government published its ‘recovery plan’ for GPs last year, aiming to ease pressure on GPs and give pharmacists new powers.
Under the plan, it pledged to invest £240 million in new telephone systems to reduce waiting times for patients seeking appointments and spend £385 million to employ 26,000 direct patient care workers.
However, at the time, health authorities warned that the plan was not “the silver bullet we so desperately need.”
Last month the Pharmacy First program – first unveiled in the recovery plan – was launched, allowing pharmacists to prescribe for seven common conditions. It means that patients struggling with minor illnesses, such as a sore throat or earache, can now bypass their GP.
But a number of GPs have already raised concerns about the Pharmacy First programme, with some pharmacies reportedly referring patients back to GP practices.
Patient numbers are rising
Although NHS England has argued that an additional 2 million GP appointments are now being made every month compared to pre-pandemic levels, the patient population has only grown since then.
According to recommendations from the BMA and the European Union of General Practitioners, GPs are now allowed to make no more than 25 appointments per day to ensure ‘safe care’.
But some doctors are reportedly having to cram in almost 90 patients a day in some areas amid an appointment crisis.
Nationally, there were 27,487 fully qualified, full-time GPs practicing in England in December, an average of one GP for every 2,078 patients.
Health chiefs say the ratio of patients to each fully qualified GP should never exceed 1,800.
This ratio is widely recognized by local medical committees – local representative committees of NHS GPs – as the ‘safe limit’.
As things stand, a further 4,000 GPs would need to be recruited to meet this ratio, MailOnline’s analysis suggests.
However, the Office for National Statistics expects that an additional 6.6 million people will live in Britain from 2036.
Assuming this growth continued in line with current demographic trends, the population of England would reach 62.2 million.
Using this figure, 34,000 GPs would need to work in the NHS to meet the ratio of one per 1,800 patients, meaning a further 7,000 GP posts would be needed over the next twelve years.
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Patient satisfaction has declined
Some even find it almost impossible to get to a GP at all, with the ‘8am scramble’ described as the rush to get tickets to Glastonbury.
Patient satisfaction has fallen to the lowest level in forty years as a result of the never-ending appointment crisis.
According to the GP Patient Survey 2023, a survey of 759,000 Brits, only seven in ten (71.3 percent) described their overall experience of their GP practice as ‘good’.
Less than half of patients (49.8 percent) indicate that they can easily reach their GP practice by telephone, compared to 52.7 percent in 2022 and 80.8 percent in 2012.
And one in four people (24.2 percent) said it was “not easy at all” to get through, five times more than 5.4 percent in 2012.
Only one in six patients (16.4 percent) could ‘always or almost always’ see their preferred GP, while 19.3 percent said they could ‘never or almost never’ see him.
Patients have also consistently expressed frustration with the lack of in-person appointments.
On average, just over two-thirds of all appointments are now held in person, compared to around 80 percent before the Covid outbreak.
Despite this, top doctors have suggested that this figure may never return to these levels, arguing that patients should not be given a face-to-face appointment if there is no clinical need for it.
However, some campaign groups disagree, warning that telephone or online conversations are not suitable for everyone and are not always the best way to diagnose patients.
Instead, dissatisfied patients have left NHS operations and instead gone to a private clinic or visited flooded emergency rooms.
But GP practices have also had to deal with increasing intimidation, assault and verbal abuse against staff in recent months.
In 2022, a man was arrested after attacking a practice in Northamptonshire, leaving a member of staff requiring stitches while other attacks were also recorded.