Covid: How GP surgeries in Wales are coping with telephone appointments

Health Reporter Ellie Pitt speaks to a patient and GP in Bridgend

Nearly two thirds of people seeing their GP is harder since the start of the pandemic amid the "necessary evil" of telephone appointments, an ITV Wales News poll reveals.

Patients have become familiar with waiting on the phone to get a doctors appointment. 

But on the other end of those phone calls are staff fielding hundreds, sometimes thousands, of calls a day.

Dr Ian Harris, of Oak Tree Surgery in Brackla, Bridgend, said: "I think it's a necessary evil, particularly around screening patients to make sure they don't have Covid symptoms when they come down to see us.

"We're all getting worn out by it. Personally I would love to go back to the days of old fashioned doctors fielding the general practise, which is where I trained, but I think it's fair to say there's no chance of that continuing while we still have health and safety measures that we have to have."

Telephone appointments are causing issues for patients too. When Minna Cliff tried and failed to see her GP a treatable and very contagious skin infection became unbearable.

She said: "I woke up on the Sunday morning and I was really in agony. I couldn't eat, my face was swollen, it was itchy, sore, bleeding."

She was told by the surgery receptionist to see a pharmacist, but a call to an out of hours service and face to face appointment with a nurse confirmed what she thought.

"The nurse said to me, 'It didn't have to be that bad', it got so much worse because I wasn't seen by a doctor.

"I'm sure there's going to be people who have something way worse than what I had and have just put it off."