The doctor will see you now. But for how long? This week the president of the Royal College of General Practitioners, Dr Helen Stokes-Lampard, said GP consultations in the UK are too short for people with complex health needs.
The average consultaton time in the UK is 10.6 minutes. This figure comes from a 2015 survey by the Commonwealth Fund on behalf of the Health Foundation, which surveyed 12,049 doctors in 11 countries. It was the second-lowest: only Germany had shorter consultation periods, at 10.3 minutes. But in Germany 80% of patients get less than 15 minutes with their GP, compared with 92% in the UK.
There is no standard time in the UK: it’s up to GPs to set the duration of appointments. But Stokes-Lampard told the BBC: “We’ve got a crazy situation whereby GPs are ridiculously overworked, there are too few of us and the whole situation is on the brink.”
Methodology: the survey of 12,049 GPs and primary care physicians in 11 countries, including 1,001 GPs in the UK, was carried out between 2 March and 8 June 2015.
