Dozens of patients were forced to queue for hours outside a south London GP surgery on Wednesday morning after struggling to get an appointment online.
A picture published on X, formerly known as Twitter, showed a long queue of patients waiting outside Hilly Fields Medical Centre in Ladywell at 8am.
Anna-Maria Cahalane, a patient at the surgery who uploaded the photograph, told the Standard that she had called the surgery before 8am to secure an appointment but was never added to a phone queue.
She later joined a line of “about 40” people outside the practice on Adelaide Avenue in the hope of getting an appointment.
After waiting for an hour and 45 minutes, Ms Cahalane said she was told to come back the following day as there were no available appointments.
“You dread someone in the family becoming ill as it is so stressful trying to get an appointment. In the queue people were sharing stories about trying to get treatment for sick children or elderly relatives. Some had been trying to get an appointment for two weeks,” she said.
“Everyone there had a horror story and you could really feel the stress building. It’s heartbreaking.”
She added: “You end up putting up with your symptoms for much longer than you should. Some people have to go to A&E but that means you are putting a burden on emergency services, which is awful. People feel really guilty about that.”
Hilly Fields Medical Centre is part of the Lewisham Care Partnership, which runs four other surgeries in the area. It cares for a population of almost 60,000 patients, according to its website.
Ms Cahalane said the service used to be “fantastic” prior to the Covid pandemic but had declined ever since.
“Once everything went online it all broke down and it became hard to get appointments, and delays were put down to the fact it was a pandemic. We thought it would get better after things got back to normal, but now it is even worse than lockdown,” she said.
“Patients just want to speak to somebody and get an appointment. It used to work efficiently and people got seen. Once you can see a doctor, it’s great. The GPs are very attentive.”
A spokesman for the South East London Integrated Care Board, which oversees primary care services in the region, said: “Hilly Fields Medical Centre apologised for the inconvenience patients experienced today.
“The practice is planning to implement a new call hub in the next 10 days which should improve their response to phone calls, and they will be launching an online triage system soon, which should also make it easier for patients to contact the practice.
“These actions are part of local work to implement the National Primary Care Access Recovery Plan.”
In August last year, the Government promised that more than 1,000 GP surgeries would have their telephone systems upgraded by spring, which officials said would end the “8am scramble” for appointments.
Figures published by the Office for National Statistics last week found that one in 20 people in England who call their GP for help are told to call back on another day.
And more than one in 10 were told they would need to wait for more than two weeks for care.
On average, the NHS is now offering around 1.4 million GP appointments every working day, according to NHS England.
GPs have complained that persistent staff shortages and an ever increasing workload have made it more difficult to meet demand.
Figures for February show that GP teams in England delivered 30 million appointments in February – up from 25 million pre-pandemic.
Almost seven in 10 appointments took place within a week of booking, while two-thirds of appointments took place face-to-face, NHS England said.
