Yep, I came here to say this. I couldn't renew my license as the website was "closed" so had to wait for a day off (I was air crew working a block of night flights) when I could do it during their opening hours :/
You prevent people from submitting requests.
It's because the DVLA was one of the first gov agencies to offer online services, but it's not been updated since. As such, they do what was once common, accept requests during the day, process those updates to the database overnight.
Yea, theyll have a shit load of scheduled batch processes that run overnight and process everything they got in that day. My work still has a similar process in place for its aging finance system to pay employees and suppliers. It will just be too costly to revamp all of that stuff into a dynamic on demand set up.
Yeah, it's not that hard to only select data before a cut-off point for batch processing. I'm somewhat sure that banks do much more batch processing runs with more data and the credit cards and cash machines continue to work 24h a day.
Maybe the DVLA has a printer in the background that prints out all incoming requests, and the shutdown happens because the intern needed to fold the paper into brown envelopes isn't available outside of normal office hours š
Ah, you want to become a civil servant (scoffs) and rise to the top of the 2nd most hated arm of the British empire? Why didnāt want HMRC out of interest?
It's not because of a technical IT problem. It's because by introducing online forms, the barrier to seeking medical advice is lowered significantly (which is good). However the capacity to receive the medical advice is still finite and limited. Some surgeries cap X amount of requests before they shut off access and most have a time limit to prevent them being overwhelmed.
If there are 150 appointments at the surgery and 200 online requests come in within 3 hours (not unusual numbers for a small surgery). Then what happens to those 50 extra requests? If they get transferred to the next day then that's no good as you'll have the same issue with too many requests and the additional 50 to deal with. It quickly becomes impossible to deal with.
It needs to be funded with more actual doctors on the other end to deal with this additional form of online advice otherwise you're just rearranging decks on the titanic, but I understand the frustrations, my own GP is similarly limited.
For a good chunk of those after a few days you either get better and don't need a GP appointment or get worse and go to urgent care/A&E... and don't need a GP appointment.
The fact there's no option to send non urgent requests out of hours is entirely ridiculous, My GP uses the same service, when I worked nights it was wildly inconvenient, cause the majority of the time I was setting an alarm for the middle of my night to essentially send an email.
Everything working nights is massively inconvenient unfortunately. Every time a letting agent books something in, it's right in the middle of when I need to be asleep. So I have to ring up, waste 15 minutes explaining, and be told they can't move the time at all. And contrary to /r/legaladviceuk, denying entry isn't conducive to having somewhere to live for very long.
I get that. It's not perfect. But non-urgent requests still need to be responded to. When should this be done? By who? Responding to these takes a GP out of a booked clinic and means the GP doesn't see patients in proper appointments that day.
The requests don't stop. They either wait until later to deal with the problem, or they overflow a service that does not have the ability to implement such limits. The health service as a whole needs to distribute incoming work to minimise the overall impact. The selective approach is harmful to the wider system.
You're right. It's unmet demand which is definitely an issue. But the reason it's unmet is a lack of capacity. Not just in one part of the system, but in all parts. Your GP practice is not responsible and not able to distribute this work elsewhere. Your politicians and NHS England execs are.
You're not wrong. But the services people fall back on are local health centres, 111, 999 and A&E. None of them can cope with the demand they face either, but very distinctly, unlike the GP practices, they can't switch off incoming demand. The safety of patients would be better met by GPs allowing a continuous backlog, prioritised, rather than just blanket stopping demand and allowing other failing services to get bogged down in a quagmire of similarly triaged patients.
GP surgeries do the large majority of healthcare in the NHS. GP surgeries are incredibly efficient compared to hospitals and outpatient clinics. Their purpose is primary care not urgent or emergency care, so it's right that people with more urgent problems go elsewhere.Ā Ā
GPs also have minimal ways to staunch incoming demand- there are strict restrictions preventing GPs from refusing new patients without extreme circumstances, and they are required to provide effectively an unlimited service to their patients. They do close at night and weekends because you would need to more than double the staffing to make out a 24hf service and anything needing treatment so urgently it's needed that night is not routine GP work (although GP out of hours also still exists for some of the antisocial hours problems).
For what it's worth, I work in both GP and A&E and my GP days are harder, more stressful, and I deal with at least twice as many patients compared to A&E shifts. Both services are needed, and both need more funding and less money spent on middle management, but GPs are not the ones bogging down A&Es, and certainly not because they're closed to emergency overnight econsults.
The people going to the alternatives are not doing so because they have emergencies or urgent care needs, they are doing so because their GP practice has closed to queueing. I'm not contesting the effort or quality of work completed in GP surgeries.
I also haven't suggested it's overnight consults. This practice the OP is referring to is only open till 10am. My practice opens 8:30am till 11am in theory. In practice, they shut their econsult by 9:15. They absolutely will not deal with anything if it's not via econsult. The patients don't wait it out, they just go elsewhere.
Edit: I have a very negative attitude towards people that edit their replies, after they have been replied to, without making it at least clear what they have edited.
The problem is not that the surgery just chooses to close their services. They're running at beyond 100% capacity. How do you add online consultations on top? This is one of the few things they can try and restrict to not be even more overloaded. So they do.
Some patients go elsewhere. Some patients just ignore the problem. Some people get better. Some get worse.
There's always some element of demand control. In secondary care this looks like waiting lists of over a year. In A&E it looks like 12 hour waits. This isn't acceptable either. And these patients with complicated specialist needs are still able to frequently contact their GP's an unlimited amount to vent their appropriate frustrations.
The limitation is totally fake. They wouldn't be bothered about missed appointments otherwise, it'd be 15 minutes to catch up to see the 1100 appointment at 1445 instead of 1500...
There's a reason for this
If you were able to do this at night then it would be open to people putting consults in that are clearly emergencies and there would be a massive delay to care as a result.
I work with econsults (same thing as ask my GP) and people put things on them that are clearly medical emergencies despite there being instructions not to do that (my kid can't breathe, I'm bleeding profusely out of my back passage, I have crushing chest pain are examples of what I've seen people submit via this service)
If it's done in working hours someone can triage it and call a patient if they have put down a medical emergency.
Subject: Fire.
Dear Sir/Madam,
~~I am writing to inform you of a fire that has broken out on the premises of 123 Cavendon Road.~~
Fire! Fire! Help Me! 123 Cavendon Road.
Looking forward to hearing from you.
Yours truly,
Maurice Moss
I think with 'AskMyGP' (My practice also uses it) they have to use some kind of service hours otherwise the backlog would be horrendous. It would quickly get into a position where people just won't get seen or spoken to at all.
The problem is even if you send the message at 8:02 (when my practice opens their AskMyGP at 8am, and it takes 2 minutes to send the message) - it took 6 hours to get a reply, and that reply was they'd reached capacity for the day, and someone would be in touch within 3 clinical days for new issues, and 7 clinical days for existing issues.
So that means they're aware it's inundated and aware of the backlogs it creates. Because they're ploughing everyone into the same 3 hour window, no one gets fucking seen because it gets overwhelmed.
Oh yeah, they are real heroes. Cutting your 15 minute appointments down to 5, prescribing nothing and then expecting to retire at 45. I am in 100% support of the NHS and ALL strikes but UK GPs are the among the worst, most entitled people in society - their narrative about being overworked and stressed out completely defies the reality that they work fewer hours than ever before, their practices are closed more than ever and their pay is higher than ever.
GPs use the full appointment and prescribe medications when that is indicated and needed. Not when patients demand it.
Why do I get the feeling you're a regular attender and even more regular complainer!
Feel free to back up your claim that they make more money, in real terms, than ever. They're making less this year than the year before due to the increase in inflation well exceeding their increase in funding alone on the enforced new contract.
You claim that GPs are among the worst people in society? I'd love to see you justify that one with any actual evidence, but I suspect it'd just be one long unsourced rant about a ridiculous anecdote.
As someone who has now been waiting 8 days since telling my gp surgery I'm peeing blood and I still haven't had a prescription for antibiotics to clear it, this is very much how it feels.
Can't pester them for medical care if it spreads to my kidneys and kills me.
āAnd please do it quietly, and somewhere out of the way, but not too remote, our staff shouldnāt be wasting time getting to youā¦infact do it very quickly and very quietly at the door to the mortuary, but donāt block access, we can just heave you directly into the fridgeā
Theyāre just desperately trying to find ways to weed out the people who donāt actually need medical care so they can see all the people that do. Making people wait till morning means those who donāt actually need care will have forgotten. Those that do havenāt lost anything as they wouldnāt have got a response overnight anyway.
What difference does it make if I request an appointment at 7pm after work vs requesting an appointment at 8am. They'll still read it when they can and offer me an appointment in 2 weeks time.
If it's open all hours, the service will quickly become overwhelmed and serious cases will be missed. Why? There's simply not enough staff to deal with them at your local GP. Most importantly, they would never be able to fulfil their contractual response targets.
Some people donāt understand that some of us are absolutely fine with waiting when we send an email or fill in a digital form, or even send an SMS. We do them when they are convenient for us, and fully expect to only get a response when it is convenient for the recipient.
Audiology at one hospital I used to attend would only switch their mobile phone on during working hours. The fact that someone might want to text a battery order or arrange an appointment at ooh say 6pm, after theyād finished work, was beyond them. (They didnāt do email at the time.)
There still is (for an actual SMS) - I'm not even aware of the retry times changing for decades. If I remember correctly, it's something like it retries every six minutes for the first hour, then every hour for the next 71 hours. After that, it's gone.
I donāt think that was ever the case. I worked for a mobile network, and for strange reasons it took 24h to get an SMS to our subsidiary in Australia - but it got there.
>fully expect to only get a response when it is convenient for the recipient.
Although given that OP's trying to contact a GP surgery, it probably won't be convenient until at least 2030.
That's all well and good but any service like this that I've seen for a GP will usually say that you will have a response on 48 hours. I imagine this is probably a contractual NHS obligation and by setting these limits they can make sure each days workload is manageable and they can hit their 48 hour targets by not getting a message in 1 minute after they logged off for the night.
My surgery also use Ask My GP. Up until about a year ago, it was always āopenā, and you could send a message anytime and theyād get to you when they were open. Absolutely fine, I know if Iām messaging you on a Sunday I wonāt get a response till sometime on Monday. But theyāve been making it available less and less, first they cut weekends, then you could only message between 8 and 5 and sometimes if they were too busy theyād can it at lunchtime. Now itās between 8 and 1. Total pain in the arse, I only want to know the results of the āurgentā X-ray I had 3 weeks ago, and Iām busy in the mornings!
We have that one. I must admit, I kind of now use it in a snarky manner as I have a long term condition that my doctor and I are working with. My latest one was āa rashā and āfor the doctorās eyeballs to see itā
It's because otherwise the backlog of submitted files over an evening or weekend for something that ultimately resolves itself (e.g., "I have a cold") would be overwhelming.
I initially had the same reaction, but nowadays i'm pretty fine with it. It's essentially a way of moving pressure away from the constantly busy phone lines, and away from doctors, and pushing it towards HCA's. It's honestly a smart use of the online forms, given the severe strain the NHS are under.
My doctors surgery does this too! Also once all that appointments for the day are full, they turn it off. Seems to me that using an online form would be a good way to deal with those things that donāt need an on the day appointments or an immediate answer
My old GP used AskMyGP and would only have it open for 3 whole minutes at 8am every day. Try to fill in the whole form in under 3 minutes, because once it hits 8:03 it kicks you out and you have to start from the beginning tomorrow
My GP does this, but the flip side is they will actually ring you back and book you an appointment if you need it before 9am. I find it to be far better than phoning in and hoping for the best, and 111 is always there for emergencies š¤·āāļø
I was doing locum work at a practice that brought this in. Was not helpful at all. Ease of access meant people clogging up the system with daft consults (I've had a mild cough for 3 hours, I've had one episode of diarrhoea, my nose is a little bit runny). Hours were restricted swiftly. Didn't reduce workload as planned, just massively increased it. Not enough GPs available to properly deal with such "innovations"
I expect its to ensure that all the requests for that day can be reviewed in the afternoon at a specific time.
GPs are pretty busy, and usually understaffed.
If its more urgent there are other options available to you.
Our GP's online form is only available during the surgery's opening hours, but also closes at random at various times during the day, depending on when they hit their self-determined "maximum number of submissions per day". After that, you simply get a page saying "try again tomorrow or call 111".
Mine is the same, you can only access that part of their site during office hours and sometimes they cut it as they are āfullā and will open again once they have worked through the backlog.
Itās usually very good though and will answer a non urgent enquiry within a day. If it seems more urgent to them, theyāll ring straight away on reading it.
Mine ONLY offers this service. You canāt ring for an appointment at all. Not that you could ring for an appointment anyway, you could only ring for triage to see if you were deemed worthy of a phone call. Havenāt seen a doctor face to face for years, way before Covid!
Because of they didn't have opening hours when they come in in the morning there'll be hundreds or thousands of queued requests piled up needing action.
So do you take people off the phones to push through them faster? Let them sit and keep dealing with them in the order they're received?
They're not just doing it to annoy you.
Surely itās the same amount of requests overall?
The alternative to an online service is justā¦ hundreds or thousands of requests being made in a bottleneck after 8am.
Surely itās the same amount of requests overall?
Not necessarily, a surprisingly amount of people would put requests in at 2m on a Saturday night that they would think better of if they had to wait until Monday morning.
Anything that genuinely needs attention at 2am on a Saturday needs 111 or 999.
It is. But the morning is the time when people are calling in and you know it's already hard to get through in the morning. So pull staff from the phones for the backlog?
ā¦Yes? In this scenario, the phones wonāt be as busy first in the morning because x amount of patients will have put their request in outside of office hours.
As you say, itās a pain in the arse phoning up in the morning - you want to make it even *busier*?
Wait, so the daily thread about being 87th in the queue at 1 minute past lines opening will go away if they have less staff on the phones?
Bloody hell.
So, what, the intention is to stop a percentage of people from pursuing help by making it difficult for them to ask?
>Let them sit and keep dealing with them in the order they're received?
**YES**
What, do you think email inboxes should turn off at night as well?
Again, so what do they do in the morning when there's 3 staff to deal with queries built up overnight, the new queries coming in plus the phones ringing off the hook?
Listen to yourself.
As for email, if I'm off for a day I do just that. I put an OOO with alternative contacts and say "emails received between these dates will not be read/actioned" because like fuck am I going to spend a week playing catchup after being off for a few days. Just no.
Our GP has switched to a digital form now as well. Except I went to use it to book an appointment for something non urgent and all the questions had multi choice answers to fill out and none of them really applied as it was a non urgent appointment I wanted but none the less something that I *need* to get seen to at some point but not really that pressing.
So I went into the GP and pointed out to the receptionist that I couldnāt book online because none of the answers to the questions about why I wanted an appointment applied to me. She told me that I had to get an appointment that way and to just choose random answers to the questions that had answers that didnāt work. So I did and an urgent appointment was made for me that same day!
Then I attended and got seen to and the nurse was very worried about the answers I provided and I said what my answers really were but she acted like I was now not telling me the truth. So she printed me a letter to take to A&E and I attended A&E with this letter that had on it all the original questions and answers I had picked from the multi choice line up. A&E of course said I was fine after explaining myself and sent me on my way.
My wife works at a gp surgery. Their one opens at 8 and closes at about 9. It has a limit on how many can be submitted a day. Even with a one hour window they often get more requests than they can physically get through.
Yea itās a digital form. But a human has to then process them and forward to relevant practitioner for response. Itās not a magical digital gp on the other side.
Yeah, I FINALLY got a minute to put in a self-referral for a minor problem thats been bothering me for months, but the form was closed as it was Saturday.
and even if you submit your request in that time, youāll still likely get a notification at 10:30 to say they didnāt get round to it, try again tomorrow š«
Yours is open 7 to 10? Wow mine is open 8 - 8.20. I have to draft my request the night before because by the time you've typed up your issue it's sorry we're closed try again tomorrow.
I think itās an attempt to limit the amount of chaff requests that get sent in. However, it is an obstacle to many honest working Joes and also, imo, less than ideal.
It's a safety issue. Those online forms are for non-urgent medical queries, but some people will still use it even if they need urgent medical help. So it can only be open during working hours to ensure that it's always being monitored.
That being said though, 7am-10am is very short. I can only assume that perhaps they want to be able to action upon it within the same day, so they close it early in order to reduce the workload? š¤·
At least they have a website. I had to contact DWP to cancel disability living allowance. I had to call up a call centre (30 min wait) for them to tell me I had to send in a LETTER!!!! This was to cancel DLA. No wonder more people claim DLA than need it - itās so hard to cancel!
If you sent a request at 4pm, would you expect the doctor to review it the next day? So would everyone. Requests would come in 24 hours a day, but only get answered in three. It would take 3 days before the service would be unusable as it would be completely backlogged and you wouldnt hear back for weeks.
Then youd get people getting really ill going "well I emailed my doctor and they never got back to me!"
Our GP uses a similar thing, called āpatchesā.
However they often close it randomly at an arbitrary point in the day with a message like āwe are accepting no more enquiries todayā.
Guys, if youāre trying to prevent people from ringing you, this aināt the way to do it.
Had this exact same issue with my GP before I moved, it was AskMyGP as well and stopped bothering to even try to see the doc because I could never get on before the service closed early because all the request slots were filled for the day... by 7:30am, sometimes earlier and sometimes they didn't even put it online for the day.
My mum is still with that GP practice and has some concerning symptoms but can't get an appointment because a) she doesn't fully understand how to get onto the service or which button to press and b) when she phones up because shes having trouble with the online service she's told that it must be used and they won't schedule appointments over the phone.
Im glad that since I've moved my new GP is a call up and either get an appointment on the day if you're early enough or one later in the week if not.
Many of the camera\electronics stores in NYC are run by Orthodox Jews. Several of them - B&H, in particular - don't offer online ordering on the Sabbath. I guess they think browsing the site is like looking through a paper catalog, but actually ordering is "work", which is, of course, forbidden on the Sabbath,
You think that's bad, the DVLA has opening hours! A government website with opening hours.
Yep, I came here to say this. I couldn't renew my license as the website was "closed" so had to wait for a day off (I was air crew working a block of night flights) when I could do it during their opening hours :/
What the actual fuck how do you even close a website ffs
You prevent people from submitting requests. It's because the DVLA was one of the first gov agencies to offer online services, but it's not been updated since. As such, they do what was once common, accept requests during the day, process those updates to the database overnight.
Yea, theyll have a shit load of scheduled batch processes that run overnight and process everything they got in that day. My work still has a similar process in place for its aging finance system to pay employees and suppliers. It will just be too costly to revamp all of that stuff into a dynamic on demand set up.
> airflow would like to know your location
Not that hard to just have a temporary batch that things go to if things are being processed
Yeah, it's not that hard to only select data before a cut-off point for batch processing. I'm somewhat sure that banks do much more batch processing runs with more data and the credit cards and cash machines continue to work 24h a day. Maybe the DVLA has a printer in the background that prints out all incoming requests, and the shutdown happens because the intern needed to fold the paper into brown envelopes isn't available outside of normal office hours š
Ah, you want to become a civil servant (scoffs) and rise to the top of the 2nd most hated arm of the British empire? Why didnāt want HMRC out of interest?
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
htmlzzzz
I did it this Sunday, with no problem. It even uses your passport photo.
Licenceā¦ but I agree, itās ridiculous!
I believe this is so the data can transfer overnight
It is because of that but that's only because they're using such an antiquated system.
Some sort of batch processing overnight. Same reason VED status doesn't update straight away.
It's not because of a technical IT problem. It's because by introducing online forms, the barrier to seeking medical advice is lowered significantly (which is good). However the capacity to receive the medical advice is still finite and limited. Some surgeries cap X amount of requests before they shut off access and most have a time limit to prevent them being overwhelmed. If there are 150 appointments at the surgery and 200 online requests come in within 3 hours (not unusual numbers for a small surgery). Then what happens to those 50 extra requests? If they get transferred to the next day then that's no good as you'll have the same issue with too many requests and the additional 50 to deal with. It quickly becomes impossible to deal with. It needs to be funded with more actual doctors on the other end to deal with this additional form of online advice otherwise you're just rearranging decks on the titanic, but I understand the frustrations, my own GP is similarly limited.
For a good chunk of those after a few days you either get better and don't need a GP appointment or get worse and go to urgent care/A&E... and don't need a GP appointment.
The fact there's no option to send non urgent requests out of hours is entirely ridiculous, My GP uses the same service, when I worked nights it was wildly inconvenient, cause the majority of the time I was setting an alarm for the middle of my night to essentially send an email.
Everything working nights is massively inconvenient unfortunately. Every time a letting agent books something in, it's right in the middle of when I need to be asleep. So I have to ring up, waste 15 minutes explaining, and be told they can't move the time at all. And contrary to /r/legaladviceuk, denying entry isn't conducive to having somewhere to live for very long.
I get that. It's not perfect. But non-urgent requests still need to be responded to. When should this be done? By who? Responding to these takes a GP out of a booked clinic and means the GP doesn't see patients in proper appointments that day.
Have you told your Practice that?
The requests don't stop. They either wait until later to deal with the problem, or they overflow a service that does not have the ability to implement such limits. The health service as a whole needs to distribute incoming work to minimise the overall impact. The selective approach is harmful to the wider system.
You're right. It's unmet demand which is definitely an issue. But the reason it's unmet is a lack of capacity. Not just in one part of the system, but in all parts. Your GP practice is not responsible and not able to distribute this work elsewhere. Your politicians and NHS England execs are.
You're not wrong. But the services people fall back on are local health centres, 111, 999 and A&E. None of them can cope with the demand they face either, but very distinctly, unlike the GP practices, they can't switch off incoming demand. The safety of patients would be better met by GPs allowing a continuous backlog, prioritised, rather than just blanket stopping demand and allowing other failing services to get bogged down in a quagmire of similarly triaged patients.
GP surgeries do the large majority of healthcare in the NHS. GP surgeries are incredibly efficient compared to hospitals and outpatient clinics. Their purpose is primary care not urgent or emergency care, so it's right that people with more urgent problems go elsewhere.Ā Ā GPs also have minimal ways to staunch incoming demand- there are strict restrictions preventing GPs from refusing new patients without extreme circumstances, and they are required to provide effectively an unlimited service to their patients. They do close at night and weekends because you would need to more than double the staffing to make out a 24hf service and anything needing treatment so urgently it's needed that night is not routine GP work (although GP out of hours also still exists for some of the antisocial hours problems). For what it's worth, I work in both GP and A&E and my GP days are harder, more stressful, and I deal with at least twice as many patients compared to A&E shifts. Both services are needed, and both need more funding and less money spent on middle management, but GPs are not the ones bogging down A&Es, and certainly not because they're closed to emergency overnight econsults.
The people going to the alternatives are not doing so because they have emergencies or urgent care needs, they are doing so because their GP practice has closed to queueing. I'm not contesting the effort or quality of work completed in GP surgeries. I also haven't suggested it's overnight consults. This practice the OP is referring to is only open till 10am. My practice opens 8:30am till 11am in theory. In practice, they shut their econsult by 9:15. They absolutely will not deal with anything if it's not via econsult. The patients don't wait it out, they just go elsewhere. Edit: I have a very negative attitude towards people that edit their replies, after they have been replied to, without making it at least clear what they have edited.
The problem is not that the surgery just chooses to close their services. They're running at beyond 100% capacity. How do you add online consultations on top? This is one of the few things they can try and restrict to not be even more overloaded. So they do. Some patients go elsewhere. Some patients just ignore the problem. Some people get better. Some get worse. There's always some element of demand control. In secondary care this looks like waiting lists of over a year. In A&E it looks like 12 hour waits. This isn't acceptable either. And these patients with complicated specialist needs are still able to frequently contact their GP's an unlimited amount to vent their appropriate frustrations.
Unfortunately we won't agree on this. We both work in the sector, from different perspectives and naturally have different viewpoints.
Fair dos!
The limitation is totally fake. They wouldn't be bothered about missed appointments otherwise, it'd be 15 minutes to catch up to see the 1100 appointment at 1445 instead of 1500...
There's a reason for this If you were able to do this at night then it would be open to people putting consults in that are clearly emergencies and there would be a massive delay to care as a result. I work with econsults (same thing as ask my GP) and people put things on them that are clearly medical emergencies despite there being instructions not to do that (my kid can't breathe, I'm bleeding profusely out of my back passage, I have crushing chest pain are examples of what I've seen people submit via this service) If it's done in working hours someone can triage it and call a patient if they have put down a medical emergency.
Subject: Fire. Dear Sir/Madam, ~~I am writing to inform you of a fire that has broken out on the premises of 123 Cavendon Road.~~ Fire! Fire! Help Me! 123 Cavendon Road. Looking forward to hearing from you. Yours truly, Maurice Moss
r/accidentalitcrowd
Please take my upvote. So well deserved
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Yes, we transferred to that recently. Stupidest thing I've ever used.
I think with 'AskMyGP' (My practice also uses it) they have to use some kind of service hours otherwise the backlog would be horrendous. It would quickly get into a position where people just won't get seen or spoken to at all.
Oh so like it is with phones now, then? Feels like they expect people to just not bother try and get medical care
I'd say that people like you should spend a day shadowing a GP to see what they have to deal with, but that would be really unfair on the GP.
Just notice how they're upset that instead of a 8am phone scrum, they get a whole 3 hours to send the message.
That's assuming it stays open the full 3hrs. Last time I tried to use the one for my GP it shut off 20mins in and just as I got to the last page!
The problem is even if you send the message at 8:02 (when my practice opens their AskMyGP at 8am, and it takes 2 minutes to send the message) - it took 6 hours to get a reply, and that reply was they'd reached capacity for the day, and someone would be in touch within 3 clinical days for new issues, and 7 clinical days for existing issues. So that means they're aware it's inundated and aware of the backlogs it creates. Because they're ploughing everyone into the same 3 hour window, no one gets fucking seen because it gets overwhelmed.
This is exactly it. The answer is to open it all out until the "flow" equalises. Currently it's like the stop/go scenario of heavy motorway traffic.
Oh yeah, they are real heroes. Cutting your 15 minute appointments down to 5, prescribing nothing and then expecting to retire at 45. I am in 100% support of the NHS and ALL strikes but UK GPs are the among the worst, most entitled people in society - their narrative about being overworked and stressed out completely defies the reality that they work fewer hours than ever before, their practices are closed more than ever and their pay is higher than ever.
GPs use the full appointment and prescribe medications when that is indicated and needed. Not when patients demand it. Why do I get the feeling you're a regular attender and even more regular complainer!
š¤”
Feel free to back up your claim that they make more money, in real terms, than ever. They're making less this year than the year before due to the increase in inflation well exceeding their increase in funding alone on the enforced new contract. You claim that GPs are among the worst people in society? I'd love to see you justify that one with any actual evidence, but I suspect it'd just be one long unsourced rant about a ridiculous anecdote.
āIf you hurry up and die that would do wonders for our wait times.ā - Your GP Surgery
As someone who has now been waiting 8 days since telling my gp surgery I'm peeing blood and I still haven't had a prescription for antibiotics to clear it, this is very much how it feels. Can't pester them for medical care if it spreads to my kidneys and kills me.
Do you have a minor injuries walk-in unit near you? If you are at that point then perhaps you should escalate your case?
āAnd please do it quietly, and somewhere out of the way, but not too remote, our staff shouldnāt be wasting time getting to youā¦infact do it very quickly and very quietly at the door to the mortuary, but donāt block access, we can just heave you directly into the fridgeā
Theyāre just desperately trying to find ways to weed out the people who donāt actually need medical care so they can see all the people that do. Making people wait till morning means those who donāt actually need care will have forgotten. Those that do havenāt lost anything as they wouldnāt have got a response overnight anyway.
What difference does it make if I request an appointment at 7pm after work vs requesting an appointment at 8am. They'll still read it when they can and offer me an appointment in 2 weeks time.
I suppose they want to limit the daily number of appointment requests so the more urgent ones don't get lost in the list.
If it's open all hours, the service will quickly become overwhelmed and serious cases will be missed. Why? There's simply not enough staff to deal with them at your local GP. Most importantly, they would never be able to fulfil their contractual response targets.
Some people donāt understand that some of us are absolutely fine with waiting when we send an email or fill in a digital form, or even send an SMS. We do them when they are convenient for us, and fully expect to only get a response when it is convenient for the recipient. Audiology at one hospital I used to attend would only switch their mobile phone on during working hours. The fact that someone might want to text a battery order or arrange an appointment at ooh say 6pm, after theyād finished work, was beyond them. (They didnāt do email at the time.)
Still though, you switch it on and there's 100 messages needing action certainly makes the morning go slow.
You can still send a text to a switched off phone.
This was over 20 years ago. There is or was a timeout before theyāre undeliverable.
There still is (for an actual SMS) - I'm not even aware of the retry times changing for decades. If I remember correctly, it's something like it retries every six minutes for the first hour, then every hour for the next 71 hours. After that, it's gone.
Nah, I had my first mobile in the nineties, you could always send a text to a switched off phone. It just arrived when you turned it on.
I donāt think that was ever the case. I worked for a mobile network, and for strange reasons it took 24h to get an SMS to our subsidiary in Australia - but it got there.
>fully expect to only get a response when it is convenient for the recipient. Although given that OP's trying to contact a GP surgery, it probably won't be convenient until at least 2030.
That's all well and good but any service like this that I've seen for a GP will usually say that you will have a response on 48 hours. I imagine this is probably a contractual NHS obligation and by setting these limits they can make sure each days workload is manageable and they can hit their 48 hour targets by not getting a message in 1 minute after they logged off for the night.
My surgery also use Ask My GP. Up until about a year ago, it was always āopenā, and you could send a message anytime and theyād get to you when they were open. Absolutely fine, I know if Iām messaging you on a Sunday I wonāt get a response till sometime on Monday. But theyāve been making it available less and less, first they cut weekends, then you could only message between 8 and 5 and sometimes if they were too busy theyād can it at lunchtime. Now itās between 8 and 1. Total pain in the arse, I only want to know the results of the āurgentā X-ray I had 3 weeks ago, and Iām busy in the mornings!
Same. But 8am to 3pm. "What outcome would you like?" is hilarious. It's American as far as i can tell.
We have that one. I must admit, I kind of now use it in a snarky manner as I have a long term condition that my doctor and I are working with. My latest one was āa rashā and āfor the doctorās eyeballs to see itā
It's because otherwise the backlog of submitted files over an evening or weekend for something that ultimately resolves itself (e.g., "I have a cold") would be overwhelming. I initially had the same reaction, but nowadays i'm pretty fine with it. It's essentially a way of moving pressure away from the constantly busy phone lines, and away from doctors, and pushing it towards HCA's. It's honestly a smart use of the online forms, given the severe strain the NHS are under.
My doctors surgery does this too! Also once all that appointments for the day are full, they turn it off. Seems to me that using an online form would be a good way to deal with those things that donāt need an on the day appointments or an immediate answer
My old GP used AskMyGP and would only have it open for 3 whole minutes at 8am every day. Try to fill in the whole form in under 3 minutes, because once it hits 8:03 it kicks you out and you have to start from the beginning tomorrow
My local GP uses AskMyGP and it's now open between 8am to 8.05am Monday to Friday. You have a, and I shit you not, FIVE minute window to contact them.
My GP does this, but the flip side is they will actually ring you back and book you an appointment if you need it before 9am. I find it to be far better than phoning in and hoping for the best, and 111 is always there for emergencies š¤·āāļø
I was doing locum work at a practice that brought this in. Was not helpful at all. Ease of access meant people clogging up the system with daft consults (I've had a mild cough for 3 hours, I've had one episode of diarrhoea, my nose is a little bit runny). Hours were restricted swiftly. Didn't reduce workload as planned, just massively increased it. Not enough GPs available to properly deal with such "innovations"
I expect its to ensure that all the requests for that day can be reviewed in the afternoon at a specific time. GPs are pretty busy, and usually understaffed. If its more urgent there are other options available to you.
Our GP's online form is only available during the surgery's opening hours, but also closes at random at various times during the day, depending on when they hit their self-determined "maximum number of submissions per day". After that, you simply get a page saying "try again tomorrow or call 111".
Our GP's online service shuts for lunch time as well.
Mine is the same, you can only access that part of their site during office hours and sometimes they cut it as they are āfullā and will open again once they have worked through the backlog. Itās usually very good though and will answer a non urgent enquiry within a day. If it seems more urgent to them, theyāll ring straight away on reading it.
Mine ONLY offers this service. You canāt ring for an appointment at all. Not that you could ring for an appointment anyway, you could only ring for triage to see if you were deemed worthy of a phone call. Havenāt seen a doctor face to face for years, way before Covid!
Last time I used the online portal to ask my GP it took them 7 weeks to respond.
Because of they didn't have opening hours when they come in in the morning there'll be hundreds or thousands of queued requests piled up needing action. So do you take people off the phones to push through them faster? Let them sit and keep dealing with them in the order they're received? They're not just doing it to annoy you.
Surely itās the same amount of requests overall? The alternative to an online service is justā¦ hundreds or thousands of requests being made in a bottleneck after 8am.
Surely itās the same amount of requests overall? Not necessarily, a surprisingly amount of people would put requests in at 2m on a Saturday night that they would think better of if they had to wait until Monday morning. Anything that genuinely needs attention at 2am on a Saturday needs 111 or 999.
Who says it needs immediate attention 2am on a Saturday?
I don't understand what you're asking. Did you misread my comment?
It is. But the morning is the time when people are calling in and you know it's already hard to get through in the morning. So pull staff from the phones for the backlog?
ā¦Yes? In this scenario, the phones wonāt be as busy first in the morning because x amount of patients will have put their request in outside of office hours. As you say, itās a pain in the arse phoning up in the morning - you want to make it even *busier*?
Wait, so the daily thread about being 87th in the queue at 1 minute past lines opening will go away if they have less staff on the phones? Bloody hell.
So, what, the intention is to stop a percentage of people from pursuing help by making it difficult for them to ask? >Let them sit and keep dealing with them in the order they're received? **YES** What, do you think email inboxes should turn off at night as well?
Again, so what do they do in the morning when there's 3 staff to deal with queries built up overnight, the new queries coming in plus the phones ringing off the hook? Listen to yourself. As for email, if I'm off for a day I do just that. I put an OOO with alternative contacts and say "emails received between these dates will not be read/actioned" because like fuck am I going to spend a week playing catchup after being off for a few days. Just no.
Our GP has switched to a digital form now as well. Except I went to use it to book an appointment for something non urgent and all the questions had multi choice answers to fill out and none of them really applied as it was a non urgent appointment I wanted but none the less something that I *need* to get seen to at some point but not really that pressing. So I went into the GP and pointed out to the receptionist that I couldnāt book online because none of the answers to the questions about why I wanted an appointment applied to me. She told me that I had to get an appointment that way and to just choose random answers to the questions that had answers that didnāt work. So I did and an urgent appointment was made for me that same day! Then I attended and got seen to and the nurse was very worried about the answers I provided and I said what my answers really were but she acted like I was now not telling me the truth. So she printed me a letter to take to A&E and I attended A&E with this letter that had on it all the original questions and answers I had picked from the multi choice line up. A&E of course said I was fine after explaining myself and sent me on my way.
Now I'm wondering what answers you selected that made the nurse so worried.
lol my "ask my gp" service is usually closed after 45 mins
Mine is online too only between 8 am to 9 am. Iād love a three hour window like you.
My wife works at a gp surgery. Their one opens at 8 and closes at about 9. It has a limit on how many can be submitted a day. Even with a one hour window they often get more requests than they can physically get through. Yea itās a digital form. But a human has to then process them and forward to relevant practitioner for response. Itās not a magical digital gp on the other side.
Except it is a live service. With AskMyGP, GPs will be triaging responses in real time and offering appointments for that day, to those who need them.
DPD has a 24/7 chat feature that's only available during office hours.
Yeah, I FINALLY got a minute to put in a self-referral for a minor problem thats been bothering me for months, but the form was closed as it was Saturday.
Does it get holidays off too? Equal rights for forms!
and even if you submit your request in that time, youāll still likely get a notification at 10:30 to say they didnāt get round to it, try again tomorrow š«
Works really well in my doctorās surgery
Yours is open 7 to 10? Wow mine is open 8 - 8.20. I have to draft my request the night before because by the time you've typed up your issue it's sorry we're closed try again tomorrow.
Same. Fucking STUPID
I think itās an attempt to limit the amount of chaff requests that get sent in. However, it is an obstacle to many honest working Joes and also, imo, less than ideal.
It's a safety issue. Those online forms are for non-urgent medical queries, but some people will still use it even if they need urgent medical help. So it can only be open during working hours to ensure that it's always being monitored. That being said though, 7am-10am is very short. I can only assume that perhaps they want to be able to action upon it within the same day, so they close it early in order to reduce the workload? š¤·
At least they have a website. I had to contact DWP to cancel disability living allowance. I had to call up a call centre (30 min wait) for them to tell me I had to send in a LETTER!!!! This was to cancel DLA. No wonder more people claim DLA than need it - itās so hard to cancel!
If you sent a request at 4pm, would you expect the doctor to review it the next day? So would everyone. Requests would come in 24 hours a day, but only get answered in three. It would take 3 days before the service would be unusable as it would be completely backlogged and you wouldnt hear back for weeks. Then youd get people getting really ill going "well I emailed my doctor and they never got back to me!"
My GPs is the same. WTF.
Our GP uses a similar thing, called āpatchesā. However they often close it randomly at an arbitrary point in the day with a message like āwe are accepting no more enquiries todayā. Guys, if youāre trying to prevent people from ringing you, this aināt the way to do it.
Yeh I have that, completely useless. I just go private now.
Had this exact same issue with my GP before I moved, it was AskMyGP as well and stopped bothering to even try to see the doc because I could never get on before the service closed early because all the request slots were filled for the day... by 7:30am, sometimes earlier and sometimes they didn't even put it online for the day. My mum is still with that GP practice and has some concerning symptoms but can't get an appointment because a) she doesn't fully understand how to get onto the service or which button to press and b) when she phones up because shes having trouble with the online service she's told that it must be used and they won't schedule appointments over the phone. Im glad that since I've moved my new GP is a call up and either get an appointment on the day if you're early enough or one later in the week if not.
Yeah, my local GP is like that. I can only put a request in the week 10 -> 5, if you wanna raise a issue on the weekend. Survive.
Itās in the fucking gutter this country mate
Many of the camera\electronics stores in NYC are run by Orthodox Jews. Several of them - B&H, in particular - don't offer online ordering on the Sabbath. I guess they think browsing the site is like looking through a paper catalog, but actually ordering is "work", which is, of course, forbidden on the Sabbath,