Just over a quarter of people in England were unable to obtain a GP appointment or waited a week or more to see or speak to someone the last time they tried, according to research.
Compiled using the responses of 858,381 people, the GP patient survey, published on Thursday, found that more than one in 10 could not get an appointment with a GP or nurse.
Out of those who could get an appointment, 17% waited a week or more to see or speak to someone, equivalent to 15% of all who responded.
If the results were extrapolated to the population as a whole, they would equate to 14 million people failing to get a GP appointment or having to wait more than a week for one – just over a million more than in July last year.
Labour claimed the figures were proof that the NHS was sliding backwards.
The shadow health secretary, Andy Burnham, said: “The Tories have made it much harder for people to see a GP, leaving people waiting days and sometimes weeks. There has been a collapse in morale amongst staff and our overburdened GP services are now in real crisis.
“David Cameron made a huge mistake when he cut the primary care budget and scrapped the right to a GP appointment in 48 hours.”
Despite the issue of waiting times, 85% of patients rated their overall experience of their GP practice as good. The overall experience of making an appointment and the convenience of their GP practice’s opening hours were each rated good by around three-quarters of patients. However, all three of these questions registered a lower proportion of positive responses than three years ago.
The Department of Health highlighted the high satisfaction levels and said it was working to ensure more people could see their GP.
A spokeswoman said: “It’s great to see that most people are satisfied with their GP, but we know that patients want to be able to see a doctor after work or at the weekend to suit their busy lives so, working with GPs themselves, we are committed to making this happen.
“Up to 18 million people will be able to access a GP from 8am-8pm seven days a week by next March – we want all surgeries to join the 2,500 already working towards out-of-hours services.”
The government has said that increased out-of-hours GP care could reduce pressure on overcrowded A&E departments. The patient survey found that of patients unable to get an appointment at all, or one that was convenient to them, one in 10 went to an emergency department or walk-in centre instead.
The health secretary, Jeremy Hunt, has pledged to hire 5,000 extra clinical staff to work in England’s 8,500 GP surgeries by 2020 to enable the NHS to help primary care services cope with the increasing challenge posed by an ageing population.
Ipsos Mori, which carried out the survey, sent out 2.6m questionnaires in total in the third quarter of last year and the first quarter of this year. There was a response rate of 32.5%.
Dr Maureen Baker, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said: “Across England we are working harder than ever to meet the needs of our growing and ageing population but longer waiting times is a sad but inevitable consequence of increasing demand not being matched with the appropriate resources in general practice, or enough GPs.
“We all need to work together to do everything possible to ‘recruit, retain and return’ as many GPs as possible, so that we can build a workforce fit to deliver the care that our patients need – and ensure that satisfaction rates with our service remain high.”
