Helen Salisbury: Looking into the abyss

Just at the moment, our GP surgery is in the happy position of having enough doctors. Our wait for routine appointments is comfortably under two weeks, which has a beneficial knock-on effect on our duty doctor days. Patients who are offered an appointment one week ahead usually feel able to wait, but if the waiting time expands to more than two weeks they often request a duty doctor call.Our urgent calls have recently fallen from over 60 a day—which didn’t feel safe for one doctor to manage—to around 40, which is stressful but achievable. However, this good fortune is both rare and fragile. Many practices are just one retirement, maternity leave, or long term sickness away from collapse. And there are gaps on the horizon in our staffing, with not a single response to our recruitment advertisement, nor, it would seem, to those of all the other practices in our…
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