Practices have had little respite over the summer, GP leaders warned, as new data showed a significant increase in appointments in July.

Practices in England delivered 27.8 million appointments in the month compared with 26 million a year earlier, according to the NHS England data. June had seen an even bigger increase in appointments, from 25.9 million last year to 29.4 million this year.

Ruth Rankine, director of primary care at the NHS Confederation, said: “These figures once again reflect the significant efforts of GPs and their staff, who are continuing to deliver for patients. General practice provided 1.36 million appointments each working day in July 2023, up from 1.24 million in July 2022, with well over two thirds of these held face to face. There has also been an improvement on the previous month in terms of how many appointments were delivered on the same day which stood at 43.6 per cent in July, up from 40 per cent in June.

“We should not underestimate the challenges ahead with general practice playing, yet again, a key role in the delivery of the COVID vaccination programme while practice and workforce numbers continue to decline. It is imperative that the needs of primary care are considered as part of wider system planning and funding for winter”.

Royal College of GPs chair Professor Kamila Hawthorne said: “The summer has historically been a quieter period and a chance for the NHS to prepare for the winter months when demand spikes. However, this July has broken the historical trend and exemplifies the constant, often unmanageable, demand that primary care is witness to all year round. GPs and their teams want to do the very best they can for all their patients, but we can only do so much. Increasing workload, without enough GPs to manage this, has inevitable consequences. Many GPs are experiencing burnout and low morale from the unsustainable demands they experience year-round. The nature of each appointment is also changing with an increase in the number of patients with complex, chronic and multiple conditions – requiring longer consultations and treatment investigations.

“The rise in the number of appointments alone doesn’t give a sense of the full picture that the daily experience of a GP has changed dramatically in recent years, and this obviously impacts on the quality and safety of care we can give to our patients. We cannot carry on like this.”

Meanwhile separate data released by NHS England showed that GPs in England have had an average earnings increase of 23% in the last ten years. According to the contractor GPs in England earned £153,400, after expenses, in the year from 2021-2022. Salaried GPs earned £68,000. GP earnings were lower in other parts of the UK at less than £120,000 for contractor GPs.

Dr David Wrigley, deputy chair of the British Medical Association’s GP committee in England, said: “Although these figures for average earnings are more than 18 months old, they reflect not only the temporary emergency funding that was made available to general practices to support their teams to give millions of vaccines, but in addition, payment for countless hours of additional work GPs did throughout the pandemic to try and keep up with routine patient demand on top of the vaccination programme. The data released today does not reflect the current reality of GPs struggling with the continually escalating costs of running a practice.”