27/01/2026
The recent post in the Wingerworth Village facebook group has triggered mixed feelings in the team. We are hugely grateful to those people who tried to explain what GPs are doing when we aren’t physically seeing a patient in person (processing results, reviewing hospital correspondence, telephone appointments, online triage, repeat prescription requests, child protection meetings, palliative care reviews, frailty conferences, audit, quality improvement etc.) There are clearly a lot of strong feelings out there. When our team are working at (and often beyond) capacity all day it feels disheartening and downright devastating to be accused of of laziness.
Please remember we are all human.
In the days of “open surgery” at Welbeck Drive the GPs usually saw between 8 and 16 patients each in a morning (usually 2 GPs on for the population of c5000 patients). We now have 8000 patients and yesterday morning had 6 GPs in clinic. Our GPs have 15 booked appointments in their clinics (the BMA advise no more than 12 for safe working). Dr George triages on average 110 appointment requests every Monday morning, that’s over 4x the number of “open surgery” sit and waits we’d have under the old system.
We are fortunate to have amazing nurses (we had one part time at the old surgery, we now have 5 nurses who all work near full time hours) Dan our paramedic, two superb clinical pharmacists , a fabulous extended scope physio…. Our admin and reception staff work incredibly hard and often receive a lot of unnecessary grief from the public.
The government insist we have online triage, we know it works well for many people and others of you hate it, you can always ring for an appointment but we are contractually required to offer the online service as first port of call.
We are sorry in spite of all this that we can’t make everyone happy. We are doing our best. In a parody of the words of JM Barrie (Tinkerbell) “every time someone says they don’t believe in GPs another GP dies (or retires early, or emigrates)”. Please value what you have. If you’ve got ideas to make things better please join our patient reference group.
