Primary care’s problems go well beyond stay-at-home doctors

GENERAL PRACTITIONERS are miserable. “We like to see patients face to face. That’s what we trained for, that’s what we want to do, that’s what we prefer to do, and that’s how we know we are making the best decisions,” says Caroline Taylor, who runs a surgery in Halifax, Yorkshire. The situation “is emotionally very challenging for everyone. It’s very draining.”

Patients are angry. Doctors at one practice in London received text messages calling them “Nazi bastards”; a receptionist in the Tees Valley was told, “If I die, it will be your fault.” Most understand the situation when you speak to them, says Dr Taylor. “But we do have abusive patients, much more than we had them in the past.”

During the worst of the covid-19 pandemic, patients were advised to stay away from GPs’ surgeries, both to ease pressure on the health service and to avoid infection. But as the country has reopened, doctors have struggled to cope with demand, upsetting both them and patients unable to receive treatment.

The angst reflects the peculiar position occupied by GPs: closer to their patients than in most countries, but distant from the National Health Service, having resisted becoming fully salaried employees on its foundation in the late 1940s. “When a patient has to wait for two years to have their hip replaced, they don’t blame the...