Patient satisfaction in their GP practice has continued to improve slightly over the past year.
Three quarters (75.4%) of patients had a ‘good’ overall experience with their GP practice, the latest NHS GP Patient Survey has found.
This represents a slight increase from the 73.9% figure in last year’s survey and continues a steady increase following a six-year low in reported satisfaction in the 2023 report.
The vast majority (93%) of respondents also said they had ‘confidence and trust’ in the healthcare professional they saw at their last appointment.
The annual survey, run by Ipsos on behalf of NHS England, also found roughly similar levels of reported ease of access to GP services.
It found:
- 53% of respondents found it easy to contact their GP practice by phone, 51% when using the website, and 49% when using the NHS app – all slight increases from 2024.
- Nearly a third (32.8%) still felt they had waited ‘too long’ for their GP appointment, although this was slightly down on the 2024 figure (34.1%).
Dr David Wrigley, the deputy chair of the BMA’s GP Committee for England, said the figures were ‘testament to the hard work and dedication’ of GPs.
‘Despite the many challenges facing general practice after years of underfunding as well as a workforce crisis, GPs and staff have gone above and beyond to deliver for their patients’, he said.
He said that the Government would need to ‘recommit to bringing back the family doctor’ as part of its 10-year health plan to ensure satisfaction rates continued to improve.
RCGP chair Kamila Hawthorne said the new figures were ‘encouraging’ but said more clarity was needed in the NHS 10-year plan and revised workforce plan to address recruitment and underinvestment in general practice.
‘Demand for our care continues to outstrip our capacity: we only have 121 more fully qualified full-time GPs than we did at the end of 2019 as the number of registered patients has risen by over 3.5 million.’
‘Without substantial investment to recruit and retain more GPs some patients will still struggle to access the care they need’, Professor Hawthorne said.
The revised workforce plan would be a ‘crucial opportunity to provide clarity on how the extra GPs promised can be recruited and retained’ to address the ongoing GP recruitment crisis.
‘This will be fundamental in ensuring that GPs are able to do their jobs without burning out and that patient satisfaction rates continue to rise’, she said.
The survey, which received over 700,000 responses, found demographic and regional variation in patients’ experience of GP practices.
Reports of ‘good overall experience’ varied by about 13 percentage points among ICB areas – 67.3% in Bedfordshire, Luton and Milton Keynes ICB compared to 80.9% in Herefordshire and Worcestershire ICB.
Slightly higher levels of respondents identifying as ‘English, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish or British’ (77%) said they had a good overall experience.
Meanwhile, satisfaction was highest among respondents identifying as ‘African’ (83%), and notably lower among the ‘Gypsy or Irish Traveller’ community (64.3%).
Similarly, there was an almost six-point difference in patient experience between those in the least and most-deprived quintiles – with 78.1% of those in the least deprived reporting a good experience compared with 72.5% in the most deprived.
The King’s Fund senior fellow Beccy Baird said described the uptick in ease of access to GP services as ‘an encouraging step forward in achieving the government’s aim to create a more digitally enabled NHS.’
Ms Baird said improvements were still necessary to address the demographic disparities in patient experience.
‘More needs to be done to address these health inequalities and ensure the NHS lives up to the principle that people should receive the same level of care regardless of where they come from and who they are.’
‘The challenge now is for national leaders and policy makers to learn from what patients have said and act on the issues they raise to drive further improvement’, she said.
In 2023, the BMA warned that only a ‘massive investment’ in general practice could turn around the lowest patient satisfaction ratings in six years. Results of the 2023 GP Patient Survey found that 71.3% had a ‘good overall experience’ of their GP practice, a slight decrease from 72.4% in 2022 and the lowest level since the 2018 survey.
Commenting on the most recent survey results, Nuffield Trust Director of Research and Policy Dr Becks Fisher said: ‘After years of decline, it is encouraging that we’re starting to see the first signs of improvement in overall experience of GP practices.
‘Continuing to boost the number of GPs will be crucial to sustaining advances in patient satisfaction.
‘However, poorer people and people from some minoritised ethnic groups are still reporting worse experience with their GP practices. We hope that government plans to review the unfair GP funding formula which disadvantages the poorest areas will eventually start to make a difference to this.’
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Who cares? Di your job well. Dont worry about disatisfaction of patients not getting whar they want. Rolling stones song. ” You can’t always get what you wan’t….”
tempted to agree our list circa 12000 and survey based on 114 responses About as accurate as cosmetic companies efficacy claims based on similarly tiny sample tested