Daily Express interrupted the lunchbreak of Dr Dan Lane to find out how it works at their surgery and see if he has any tips on how to avoid the “8am rush”. Dr Lane says that if all five thousand of the patients registered at Willingham Surgery in Willingham by Stow, near Gainsborough, phoned at the same time there would be a problem.But thankfully that has never happened.
He said: “I’ve always hated this idea of an 8am rush, and while I can’t speak for all GP surgeries, I think that can be a bit of an artificial concept.
“I’ve always said, if you feel you need to speak to me about something, you know, three in the afternoon, call me at three in the afternoon. Call me when you know you’ve got a problem instead of waiting until 8am the next day.”
Dr Lane said: “It’s a bit like an email system, really. Patients can send us a message saying what their problem is, how long it’s been going on for, what they’re hoping we might do about it, and immediately that pops up on our system at our end, and a GP or a nurse practitioner will see that and is then able to respond.
“But for patients who don’t have internet access, obviously we tend to have them phone up and put requests through via our receptionists.”
The surgery in Lincolnshire usually gets 140 requests for consultations on a Monday and 80 or 90 a day during the rest of the week.
And the GP says sometimes there are occasions where he has to move appointments around so the highest priority cases can be seen first.
He said: “This afternoon I had someone booked in with something that wasn’t particularly urgent. I had another patient who I know very well who’s got a very brittle chest and it sounds like she’s got an infection so she needs to be seen today and sorted out. So I’ve had to move the first one so I can see the second one.
“Thankfully this doesn’t have to happen very often.
“The other one I actually get probably more commonly is regarding blood tests. So if I’ve got a patient who I’ve seen and I think ‘I’m a bit concerned about you. I really want to know what your bloods are today’.
“At that point, you might have to say, well, actually, after the phlebotomist clinic is full, we’re going to have to pick someone and say, do you know what, this is your annual review bloods, we’ll do those next week. And then we can do the other person that day. It’s common sense really I suppose.
“In our practice it’s a GP that decides that based on the information we have in front of us.”
This story originally appeared on Express.co.uk
