Urgent action is needed to look after practice teams as they face a continuing increase in requests for appointments, GP leaders said following the release of the latest data.

The latest set of GP appointment data in England shows a rise in the number of GP appointments, including face to face ones, with practices in England delivering 33.9 million appointments in October – more than four million more than in September and more than three million more than the same month in 2019.

Dr Farah Jameel, British Medical Association GP committee chair, said: “These statistics clearly illustrate that GPs and their teams are continuing to do more and more as they strive to look after patients who need them the most.” She said the number of people being seen face to face is rising, which demonstrates that criticisms aimed at GPs, that their practices are closed and they are not seeing patients in person, are wrong. That 3.5 million appointments were down to COVID vaccinations is testament to the continuing hard work of GP teams as they play a vital role in tackling the pandemic on the ground through the booster programme,” she said.

“What’s not picked up in these statistics, though, are the reams of other work that GPs and their colleagues do outside of consultations – whether this is following up on referrals, writing letters, assessing test results and managing practices. Couple this with the fact we’re continuing to lose GPs – we now have the equivalent of more than 1,700 fewer full-time family doctors than we had in 2015 – and the mounting workload is reaching breaking point. Staff are exhausted and demoralised, and there are simply not enough hours in the day to provide safe, quality care to patients. General practice prides itself on its relationship with communities, and the continuity of care it provides to local patients. Urgent action is needed to reach solutions that give practices, their hardworking dedicated teams, the space and time to do what they are best at, looking after patients in their time of need.”

Professor Martin Marshall, chair of the Royal College of GPs, said general practice was stretched before the pandemic, but the intense workload and workforce pressures have been exacerbated by the crisis. Today’s figures show GPs and our teams are working incredibly hard delivering safe, timely and appropriate care for patients, as well as two huge vaccination programmes to protect patients,” he said.

“Despite this, the size of the qualified full-time equivalent workforce fell by almost 6% between September 2015 and August 2021 while the number of patients has continued to grow meaning that the ratio of patients to GPs has increased by more than 10%. We are facing a workload crisis that risks negatively impacting patient care. This is why the Government needs to make good on its promise of an additional 6,000 GPs by 2024 – which the Secretary of State has said is not on track to be met. Good work is ongoing to attract medical students to choose general practice, but we need to see robust plans to keep more experienced and highly-trained in the profession longer – and this needs to start by tackling ‘undoable’ workload – so we can continue delivering the care our patients need and deserve.”