Medical emergency: general practice is broken

In March 2020, as the health service prepared for the first Covid wave, NHS England encouraged GPs to adopt a new system called ‘total triage’. The aim was to reduce the number of patients in clinics in order to protect GPs, their staff and patients themselves from the virus. If patients hoped this system was a temporary, emergency measure, they were wrong.

Under ‘total triage’, patients had to provide far more details of their (sometimes sensitive and embarrassing) symptoms to a receptionist or on an e-consultation form. They would then be allocated a telephone consultation with their GP or another health professional such as a nurse, pharmacist or physiotherapist. In the first year of the pandemic, records show there were 90 million fewer face-to-face appointments – a drop of 40 per cent. Of these, 70 million happened on the phone instead, but the figures still show tens of millions fewer appointments overall.

While Britain is moving on from Covid, many GP surgeries are emphatically not.