I went for a face-to-face appointment at my GP surgery last week. Mask safely covering the huge zit that had developed on my chin – check. For once, though, I wasn’t there in an official or a work capacity, but as a patient. Yet, as I sat in the silent and sombre waiting room, my heart broke.

Not for the patients lining up to receive their vaccine at the other side of the building.

Not for the little boy I saw wearing his mask, with no idea why he wasn’t allowed to play with the waiting-room toys anymore.

Not even for the walk-in patient who couldn’t “just have two minutes to speak with the doctor” she so desperately wanted to see.

My heart broke for the reception team trying their best to hold it all together.

In the 12 minutes I sat in the waiting room, three individuals raised their voices at the reception staff. I heard someone in the backroom team deal with at least two problematic and seemingly aggressive phone calls, and I can only imagine the number of emails that were pinging through in that 12 minutes.

12 minutes.

And as I sat there, I knew that what the staff really wanted to say to all those patients was a simple ‘Yes’.

“YES, Mrs Hoyle. You can speak to a healthcare professional within the hour.”

“YES, your repeat prescription will of course be with you within the next 15 minutes.”

“YES, of course, we can fix your crippling mental health by tomorrow.”

“Chronic back pain? YES, we’ve got something for that. Would you like an appointment today?”

“YES, I have time to listen to how the healthcare system has let you down, and YES I have all the answers that will make it better.”

“YES, I will be home on time tonight.”

“YES, I’m okay.”

“YES…”

 A look back at the last few months

It seems a bit taboo and something you’re not supposed to say these days, but to hell with it. In many ways, life was easier during lockdown.

There, I said it.

Not because of the virus itself, but because of the expectation it instilled in our society and in our patients. Our society who demand and expect everything they want instantly, whether it be through the click of a button on their phone, or the sending of an email – lockdown made it all stop.

But now lockdown is easing, the demands are back with a vengeance – and no one seems to be talking about how life is anything but normal for the healthcare world, which is now expected to reopen ‘like normal’ while administering vaccines, tackling waits in secondary care and dealing with every other possible fallout of our generation’s most deadly virus.

There will be people – patients – who see this and demand to know what I’m talking about. “That’s not me!” they will say. And, of course, most of them will be right. So who is responsible for the torrent of verbal abuse shared in IGPM’s poignant viral video? Who inspired this very real and very public call on BBC Breakfast recently to end abuse for our GP staff?

Most of the time, these are harsh words and rants fuelled by frustration, fear and upset. They are words spoken in the heat of the moment and forgotten when the call is ended or the comment is sent – by everyone but the professional who took the call or who read the message and who now feels like something stuck to the bottom of your shoe.

Yes, life is returning to normal.

For some of us.

But for the healthcare industry, a new storm is brewing – and it’s not the virus they’re afraid of anymore.

It’s the patients.

Why is this happening?

There are times when I genuinely wish I could get inside the head of someone else and ask them WHY they act in such a way. Don’t you? I study it for a living and still I’m dumbfounded by it.

When you see someone complaining about supermarket prices to the young Saturday worker. When you see a teenager being told off for the way they have been raised. When you see a receptionist being told that the lack of available face-to-face appointments is THEIR fault.

You can pretend it isn’t happening, but it is.

You can pretend you don’t care, but you do.

It’s because the world stopped for everyone else – but not the healthcare industry. And while everyone else makes a slow return to work and normal life, demand on medical time and expertise has more than doubled. It has multiplied, spiralling out of control as GP surgeries and practices conduct regular appointments, engage in telephone consultations, keep patients and staff safe, arrange and administer countless vaccines…

When does it end?

It doesn’t. That’s the job, and it’s one that I know from experience that general practice staff, both clinical and non-clinical, love to do. But how many abusive calls and conversations can they be expected to take before that love starts to waver?

What do we do next?

It’s time to open our eyes to the reality of the situation for everyone involved.

They say that communication is the key to solving any problem – and in this case communication is absolutely what we need. The brighter, local, right-from-the-heart kind – not the national, generic, box-ticking stuff that isn’t being seen or engaged with much anymore, if at all.

But it isn’t enough to simply send out a few emails and post the odd social-media video. COVID-19 brought us together, almost as quickly as it pulled us apart and forced us to lock down. It showed us new ways of working and different ways of collaborating – and now it’s time to put what we’ve learnt into practice.

If I could share one piece of advice with GPs and healthcare professional bodies right now, it would be to stop suffering endless abuse on your own. CHANGE the conversation and start communicating WITH patients rather than simply talking at them.

It’s time to stop hiding behind official announcements, to turn off Facebook comments and reignite some of that love we felt from last year – because it IS still there, I promise. It’s time to take your own practice into your own hands. Tell your patients everything that’s going on and invite them to understand the reality of the situation. Let’s show, not tell them what it’s really like. Because until you allow them in to understand, how can you possibly expect them to know what to say?

You’ll need a team, you’ll need a plan, and you’ll likely need some specialist training or mentoring. And whether you get that from a dedicated organisation like Yorkshire Medical Marketing, or from your own research and experience, you’ll find that over time, the more you share and talk with your patients as honestly and as humanly as you would a friend, the better the response will be.

And one day, in the not-too-distant future, hopefully you will be able to say ‘Yes’ again.

P.S. The zit has now gone. Things do get better.