Today, we’re speaking to Dr Jamie Scuffell, GP and NIHR In Practice Fellow at King’s College London.

Title of paper: Patterns in GP Appointment Systems: a cluster analysis of 3480 English practices

Available at: https://doi.org/10.3399/BJGP.2024.0556

GP practices in the UK are using a wide range of different appointment systems to meet patient demand and improve access. This cluster analysis of NHS appointment data from 56 million appointments and 3480 English practices demonstrates two predominant models of primary care delivery. ‘Same day’ practices tend to fulfil appointments on the same day using GP telephone consultations. ‘Routine care’ practices tend to employ non-GP staff members offering face-to-face appointments and longer appointment wait times. ‘Same day’ care practices had younger and more urban populations.

Episode transcript

This transcript was generated using AI and has not been reviewed for accuracy. Please be aware it may contain errors or omissions.

Speaker A

00:00:00.640 - 00:00:54.360

Hello and welcome to BJGP Interviews. I'm Nada Khan and I'm one of the Associate Editors of the bjgp. Thanks for listening to this podcast today. In today's episode, we're speaking to Dr.

Jamie Scuffle, who is a GP in South London and an NIHR In Practice Fellow at King's College London. We're here to talk about a really topical issue in his new paper here in the bjgp.

The paper is called Paper Patterns in GP Appointment A cluster analysis of 3,480 English practices.

So, hi, Jamie, it's really great to meet you and talk about this work, I guess, really just to start, as you point out in this paper, each practice has their own systems and strategies to manage appointment booking. But how do you think that this impacts on access and patient appointment booking in each practice?

Speaker B

00:00:55.000 - 00:02:17.300

Yeah, it's interesting because I think, as you say, appointment systems have developed even further, really, since COVID and we've ended up with this a quite interesting diverse range of implementing appointments across the country, across England at least.

And I suppose the things that have changed are, you know, if you phone up a practice now, actually, you might not even phone them up, you might submit an online consult, you might be triaged, you might see not a gp, but a range of other professionals as well. And also it might not be done face to face, it might be done by telephone or online.

In fact, there's a new appointment system range of things that have happened across England, and actually there's some evidence that that might relate to access in some ways. So we know lots of people who don't speak English struggle to navigate that system of getting an appointment, for example.

And we also know from the qualitative evidence that there's some digital exclusion as well with appointments. So, yeah, so I think there's lots of issues with access and how that relates to appointment systems.

And so far what we've done is looked at components of the appointment system and how that then affects access. But what we haven't really done much of is looking at the appointment system as a whole and how that might affect access.

Speaker A

00:02:18.180 - 00:02:33.200

Yeah.

So in this study, you wanted to look at patterns of primary care delivery in English GP practices, and you used this Appointments in General Practice data set. Can you tell us just briefly what's available in this data and what you were looking at here?

Speaker B

00:02:33.360 - 00:03:20.700

It's a tremendous data set and I think could be very useful. So...