Primary Care Pathfinder – discovery report

Participants who took part in interviews for this study were contacted in February 2022, after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

They said they understood health services were under pressure both before and since the pandemic started and agreed that prioritising certain people was important. Funding and resources were widely understood to be constraints.

What they found concerning, however, was being driven through the same process to talk to a GP, regardless of the reason for making contact or of their individual health backgrounds.

‘Potluck’ on phonelines

They struggled with getting through on busy phonelines, which relied heavily on what some called “potluck” or sheer persistence. Some described having to redial to join the call queue or to queue for 20-50 minutes each time they called, or both. Some found it more efficient to visit the practice in person.

Another talked about trying to access online bookings, constantly refreshing the webpage “like when you’re buying tickets for a concert” to check whether more appointment slots had become available.

Citizens felt practices had introduced barriers to access at a time when they were most in need, less able to cope and frequently without enough effort to forewarn them.

Our findings are supported by the results of a survey commissioned by DSPP, asking people in Wales about their experience of using NHS services, published in December 2021. 406 citizens participated in this study. It found that:

The two main reasons given by respondents were:

These findings were reinforced by NatCen’s 2021 British Social Attitudes survey, Public satisfaction with the NHS and social care 2021, published in March 2022. This study surveyed a nationally representative sample (across England, Scotland and Wales) of 3,112 people.