MEDICAL EMERGENCY

Nearly half of us leave the GP without having discussed all our concerns. It's no wonder when we're given 10 minutes and made to feel guilty for going anyway, says Helen Coffey

- Helen Coffey

There’s a special kind of irony to GP appointments these days. You must overcome countless obstacles to secure one: waiting on hold even when you were poised to ring the second the surgery opened; spilling your guts to the battleaxe of a receptionist, a gatekeeper more fearsome than any Tolkien dragon or mountain troll; describing your most excruciatingly embarrassing symptoms in a clinical online form; getting triaged over the phone by a total stranger who may as well be an AI chatbot. Then, having expended all that time and energy simply on getting seen, the whole thing is over in the blink of an eye, providing nothing more than the opportunity to repeat the whole saga to someone who’s clearly not read your notes.

The grand total of 10 minutes in the consulting room will be spent with, at best, a well-meaning but overworked healthcare professional who’s already running 45 minutes behind schedule by 9am and doesn’t have time for anything but the most arbitrary of interventions. At worst, it will be spent with a not-so-well-meaning but overworked healthcare professional who makes it abundantly clear that your trifling ailments are just another drain on a chronically under-resourced NHS.

The other irony is that, by the time you get to see a doctor, weeks or sometimes months after the fact, the original health problem has often evolved into something else entirely and three brand new issues have reared their heads. But any notion you might have of “just mentioning that weird foot rash while I’m here” shrivels and dies under the glassy-eyed gaze of a person whose primary objective is to get you in and out as quickly as possible. Some surgeries have even brought in an official policy – “one problem per consultation” – to ensure you stick to the brief, all the more galling when you’ve had to wait an inordinate length of time to see anyone in the first place.