More than seven out of ten respondents to the latest national GP Patient survey said their overall experience of their GP practice was good, and nine out of ten said their needs were met at their last appointment.
Almost seven in ten (67%) said their overall experience of contacting their GP practice was good, although only 12% said their call was answered straight away the last time they contacted their practice.
And seven out of ten respondents to the 2024 survey said they knew the next step in dealing with their request within two days of contacting their practice – still short of the targets set out in May 2023 by the previous government in its Delivery Plan for Recovering Access to Primary Care. This aimed to tackle the 8am rush and reduce the number of people struggling to contact their practice. It stated that patients should no longer be asked to call back another day to book an appointment but should know on the day they contacted their practice how their request would be managed.
Changes to the way the data were collected mean that it is difficult to make direct comparisons with previous surveys, but on the face of it, patient satisfaction has dropped by more than 10% since 2018, while those whose experience was poor has more than doubled, from 6% to 13%. In the 2024 survey, 5.4% of respondents described their experience as ‘very poor’, and another 13.3% of patients said their experience of their GP practice was ‘neither good nor poor’.
In response, Ruth Rankine, director of primary care at the NHS Confederation, said: ‘The improvement in patients’ experience of their GP practice is testament to the hard work of staff working in a sector facing a combination of rising demand, falling investment and increasing workforce challenges.
‘The fact that despite these pressures primary care is performing well only goes to show what could be achieved with the right support and investment.
‘[We] welcome new Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting’s pledge to divert funding from hospitals into primary and community services. Ideally this shift would form part of a long-term plan to recover primary care including long term investment and improvement work.
‘The Secretary of State’s commitment to providing durable solutions to the problems facing the NHS is also welcome and will hopefully end the short-termism that has hampered improvement efforts over the last couple of years.’
