The GP Phone Call Lottery

If you’re in the UK and you need to access medical help, you can do one of two things: for an emergency you call 999 or walk straight into A&E, and for anything else you ring your GP to get a doctors appointment. It’s a simple process, but in the wake of the COVID pandemic, it’s been buggered into a Kafkaesque circus known as the phone call lottery.

It’s a Wednesday, the day that things like to go wrong. You wake up and you feel odd. Different. Something’s not right and you want someone to check it out. Maybe you have difficulties moving your hand, maybe your mental health has taken a massive blow and you need something getting back on track, maybe it’s something you’ve been putting off seeing help for because you didn’t want to be a burden – No matter what, you decide that you need to see a doctor before it becomes a bigger problem.

So you look up your GP surgery online, when you check the contact page on their website a massive banner in all caps assaults you – they can’t sort out any appointments over email, you’ll have to call instead. That’s alright, thankfully you’re not the sort of person who gets anxious about making phone calls, so you grab your phone and punch in the number.

You swiftly get through to a receptionist. They bluntly inform you that all the appointments for the week have been booked, and that they’ll be opening up more on Monday. It’s alright, you think. It’s currently not a problem, I can wait a few days.

So you go through the rest of the week and before you know it Monday’s back again. When you have some free time at work you decide to ring your GP – you get through to the same receptionist who tells you that all the slots have been filled, and to call tomorrow at 08:30. It’s a tad annoying, sure, but waiting another day isn’t an issue.

Tuesday comes along quickly and at 08:30 you dutifully ring up. You’re greeted with a low quality voice recording informing you that you should only ring this early if you have an emergency, and to call at 10:00 if you don’t. You can’t tell if the sound you make is a groan or a sigh, but you guess it must be good that people who need urgent help can get it.

Before you know it you’re on the phone again. The same automatic message from earlier plays before you’re thrust into a mind-numbing phone menu. When pressing the button wot gets you an appointment, you’re promptly put on hold. Some faux-lounge feelgood piano piece crackles down the wire, assaulting your ears as you’re forced to listen out for someone to pick up. Your only saving grace is that it’s not Vivaldi’s Spring.

Eventually you make it through to the receptionist who starts prying into the issue you’re calling about – it’s supposed to be a policy to make sure you’re not a time-waster, but it feels like they’re looking for any excuse to drop you. After a solid interrogation you finally get the chance to ask for an appointment.

Due to the nature of your issue you ask to see a doctor in person, only to be told that they’re only taking appointments over the phone for the time being.

You ask when you’ll be able to see them in person. You’re informed that they don’t work at the practice, but instead bounce between different practices around the region each week – they’ll be back here in 3 weeks time. It’s a bit of a wait, but you ask the sensible thing: can I book an appointment for 3 weeks time?

The receptionist immediately shoots you down. They only open appointments for the next week.

At some point the endless hoops to jump through become exhausting and you simply give up on trying. Eventually you end up in A&E when the minor thing you wanted checking out became something major, leaving you wondering why you were denied access to a doctor in the first place.

It’s a sodding nightmare but it’s the reality of trying to get help nowadays, especially if your GP doesn’t offer a web portal to book appointments on. If I was able to simply email my practice and succinctly note what my issue was (rather than stumble over my words in a rushed phone call) and asked to be seen at any point in the next month, life would be easy.

I’m not a genius who can fix the problem, just someone who’s practically given up on their health because of all of this.

It wasn’t always this way, most of the time you could ring whenever and get an appointment in the next 7 days, but chronic underfunding, COVID, and an increase of workload & patients left a lot of practices on their knees – with a good chunk of doctors figuring they could live a less stressful life if they just quit. I don’t think I can really fault them.

A while ago I stumbled upon a 2005 episode of Question Time wherein Tony Blair (holding my tongue) faced a crowd who were suffering from a Labour policy gone awry: Blair’s government set a target that people shouldn’t have to wait more than 48 hours for a GP appointment, and GPs followed it to the letter. People were complaining that they couldn’t get an appointment a few days away. As someone stuck in this phone call lottery hellscape, it seems insane that it used to be possible to see a doctor so quickly.

While rewriting this, a coworker with a long-lasting issue got a call from his doctor to make an appointment. He rang his GP immediately and like clockwork, was asked to call again at 08:30. You couldn’t make it up.