Patient contacts with GP practices have trebled in the last few years – with doctors now having to run unsafe levels of appointments, a major service provider has revealed.

The Modality Partnership, which has 49 practice sites with 450,000 patents, said it now receives 4.8 million calls a year. Speaking to The Independent, its leaders said patient contacts have increased by 200% since the pandemic.

It says GPs are now having to manage up to 50 appointments a day, compared with the 35 recommended by the British Medical Association. The increase includes a 54% annual increase in prescriptions, a 30% increase in blood tests and 25% increase in administration tasks.

Clinical chair Dr Mina Gupta said: “Winter is a bit scary for us because the cost of living crisis is going to start to hit people. There’s going to be a tsunami of demand coming through for lots of different reasons. I’ve never seen so many mental health presentations, I’ve been a GP for 35 years, and I haven’t seen so much. Every call has an element of mental health.”

Chief executive Vincent Sai said: “We believe patient contacts have increased 200%, over the last few years. The expectation is that GP practices have maybe four to five patient contacts per year, but if you just look at just the number of phone calls alone, it’s showing that it’s much more now. So, something is broken somewhere…there’s more work, there are fewer people. People say I can’t get access to my GP and the hypothesis is they’re just lazy and not working, but it’s not the case.”

Whilst it is stated within The Independent that there are nearly 1,500 more doctors working in general practice now than 2019, that a record number of students started training last year and the government we are spending £1.5billion to create 50 million more appointments by 2024, it should be noted that there has actually been a decrease in qualified GPs (both Partners and Salaried GPs) during this time and as detailed in the following information provided by BMA.