GPs' workload

More patients, more patience

Using the information gathered in our Health of the Nation study, we have an illuminating insight to both our GPs’ normal working days – and the trends being shown by their patients.

• Almost half (48%) of GPs carry out between 101-150 appointments a week.
• Almost the same number (46%) carry out fewer than 25 telephone consultations a week.

It’s interesting to see that very few patients opt for telephone consultations. This could be a preference for face-to-face appointments, but may also be due to the fact that telephone consultations aren’t pro-actively offered by practice staff booking appointments.

• On average, GPs currently work 36 hours, 7 minutes a week.

When asked how their work would change over the next 5 years, 54% said they thought their hours would increase – and only 5% felt they would fall. While this research suggests that GPs spend the majority of their time actively dealing with patients’ medical problems (on average, 26 ½ hours per week), nearly everyone we spoke to (93%) said that practice nurses could have dealt with up to a quarter of those issues.

It’s true that a GP is sometimes thought of as a counsellor or a confidante – and in many cases, those appointments are as important as physical treatment – but it appears as though there’s still work to do, raising awareness of general health issues to free up GPs’ time.

As further evidence of this, 88% of the GPs we questioned said that between 1% and 25% of their time was spent dealing with minor medical issues that didn’t need to be seen by either a nurse or a GP. One in ten GPs estimated that up to 50% of their time was spent dealing with otherwise healthy people.

Would you like to see more details?

For more information, we encourage you to download the full Health of the Nation report (PDF 539KB). Hard copies are also available by request, from hcpr@aviva.co.uk.