More than half of GPs say they are working above safe limits, on average completing 11-hour days and dealing with a third more patients than they say they should be, findings from Pulse’s major workload survey reveal.
Full-time family doctors are on average dealing with 41 patients in a day – when GPs said the safe limit should be 30, according to Pulse’s survey of 1,681 UK GPs.
Some are seeing far higher numbers of patients – around one in ten deal with 60 patients or more in a day.
Meanwhile, they reported the intensity of work was high, with GPs saying 29% of their patient contacts – a mixture of face-to-face, phone, online appointments and home visits – were ‘very complex’, and 37% were ‘fairly complex’.
For more information and to read the full details go to Pulse