Patient satisfaction plunges as GPs opt for remote sessions

Patients' satisfaction with GP services has collapsed in recent years as family doctors have offered far fewer face-to-face appointments, research has revealed.

- Denis Campbell

The proportion of patients seeing a GP in person has plummeted from 80.7% in 2019 to 66.2% last year. Telephone appointments have almost doubled over the same period, from 13.4% to 25.4%.

Video or online appointments, including some in which patients fill in an online form but have no direct interaction with a GP, have risen almost eightfold, from 0.6% to 4.6%.

The research by the Institute for Government (IfG) thinktank also found that patients valued face-to-face appointments so highly that they regarded them as more important than their GP surgery offering more appointments overall by maximising the number provided remotely.

Patients are more satisfied with practices that offer more in-person sessions, and less satisfied with those favouring telephone and remote consultations, even though those free GPs up to see more people.