Patients’ satisfaction with GP services has collapsed in recent years as family doctors have switched to providing far fewer face-to-face appointments, new research has revealed.
The proportion of patients seeing a GP in person has plummeted from more than four-fifths (80.7%) in 2019 to just under two-thirds (66.2%) last year.
Telephone appointments have almost doubled over the same period from 13.4% to 25.4%. Those undertaken by video or online, including some in which patients fill in an online form but have no direct interaction with a GP, have risen almost eightfold from 0.6% to 4.6%.
The Institute for Government (IFG) thinktank also found patients valued face-to-face appointments so highly that they regarded them as more important than their GP surgery offering more appointments overall by maximising the number provided remotely.
They are more satisfied with practices that offer more in-person sessions, and less satisfied with those relying more on telephone and remote consultations, even though those free GPs up to see more patients.
The dramatic shift in how family doctors interact with patients has coincided with a huge fall in public satisfaction with GP services.
“Patient satisfaction is higher in practices that deliver more of their appointments face to face,” according to an IFG report tracking the performance of England’s 6,200 GP surgeries since 2019. Surgeries that offer the most remote appointments have experienced the biggest falls in satisfaction, the IFG analysis shows.
Source: The Guardian, 22 April 2025
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