COVENTRY MESSAGE BOARD

Doctors " ask for your support at this challenging time"



GP bosses say that a "significant increase in demand" and staffing issues is behind doctors offering fewer face-to-face appointments in Coventry.

The Coventry Local Medical Committee has issued a statement after CoventryLive reported on people's anger at not getting to see a GP in person, often having to rely on phone consultations and video calls.

One woman claimed she'd been trying for three weeks to get a doctor to see her four-month-old baby.

The letter from the medical committee is signed by medical secretary Dr Sarah Matthews, chairman Dr Gavin Shields and vice-chairman Dr Rajeev Kolluri who have assured that practices in the city are all offering face-to-face appointments when it is clinically appropriate to do so.

It read: "GP practices have seen a significant increase in demand, difficulties in recruiting staff and in addition to this it is General Practice that has delivered the majority of Covid vaccinations both within Coventry and nationally.

"This is on the back of the ongoing pressures of the Covid-19 pandemic which has seen all General Practices have to adopt new ways of working."

This comes after a reader, Mel Robertson, told us she had been made aware the ongoing problem after seeing comments on an app called ‘Next Door’.

One comment read: “Sick to death of trying to see a doctor. It has taken me 67 minutes on the phone this morning only to be told yet again we can only give [me] a phone consultation.”

Another patient said: “I have a 4 month old baby, I’ve been trying to get him in to see the doctor for 3 weeks about his skin, also been waiting 5 days for the doctor to do a prescription for him.”

Mel also told us: "My partner has a life-threatening condition and gets recurring blood clots in his legs and I have a mental health condition, we need to see our GP.”

GP phone consultations being recorded as face-to-face appointments



Telephone consultations with GPs are being incorrectly classed as “face-to-face” appointments in official statistics, NHS chiefs have admitted, following an investigation by The Telegraph.

In recent weeks, ministers, including the Prime Minister, have intervened to promise patients access to face-to-face appointments, amid mounting concern about the difficulties some are facing.

Before the pandemic, about 80 per cent of consultations took place in a doctor’s surgery. However, the latest monthly figure is just 58 per cent, with little change since officials vowed in May to give all patients the right to a “face-to-face” appointment.

Now, The Telegraph can reveal that even this figure exaggerates the number of consultations which are actually taking place in person.

NHS officials said that because of the way some local systems were set up, some appointments were automatically being logged as face-to-face slots, regardless of how they were actually delivered.

Dennis Reed, the director of Silver Voices, a campaign group for the over-60s, said: “This needs to be investigated. How many of the figures have been fiddled in this way? It is really worrying.

“I know that practices are under a lot of pressure to increase the number of patients getting a face-to-face appointment, and it worries me that we could see more and more of this.”

Anne Bedish, a Telegraph reader, viewed her own patient record online, and was surprised to see that all the telephone appointments she had in the past year had been recorded as “face-to-face” consultations.

The 68-year-old, who suffers from a number of health problems and was on the Government’s clinically vulnerable list, had 12 phone appointments in the past year, which she found had been classed as “face-to-face” visits.

When she contacted Glenlyn Medical Practice, in East Molesey, Surrey, to question the miscategorisation, they confirmed that the appointments had been by telephone, but the record went unchanged.

NHS Digital, which publishes national data on GP appointments every month, suggested this pattern could occur far more widely, because of the way data has been recorded.

Mrs Bedish said: “It really worries me that this data is giving a misleading picture of how many patients are actually getting a face-to-face appointment with their doctor, and allowing ministers to claim the situation is improving.

“I have no problem with my GP practice. Some of my appointments, like one for a skin condition, would have been better face-to-face. But my concern really is about the national data, and how it’s claiming most appointments are happening in person when it doesn’t seem that way at all.”