An eye-opening day with a busy GP

I have just spent a day in a GP’s surgery. I was not detaining her with any complicated medical complaint of my own. I was shadowing her as a journalist.

Some weeks ago I wrote a column for the Times whose headline (though not my choice) brutally summarised my argument: that general practitioners were becoming glorified receptionists for the specialist medical services offered by the NHS; that patients should be able to save time and money by going straight to a specialist if they were sure of their problem; and that GPs, though hard-working, were often busy with counselling that a less expensively trained and less well paid nurse practitioner or medical assistant could provide.

As you can imagine, the column attracted much comment, some of it sympathetic but much of it hostile, from GPs who felt variously that I had misrepresented, misunderstood, overlooked or underestimated what they did. A few invited me to sit with them in their surgeries and see for myself. I accepted two of these invitations, one from a doctor in a rural practice and one from a doctor whose surgery served a mixed but generally poor locality in a big English provincial city.

I have yet to spend my rural GP-day, but have shadowed the city doctor. Her patients were asked beforehand if they minded an observer being present: only one did, and I stayed out. Otherwise I sat quietly in the corner of a cheerful but cramped little surgery, taking notes and trying to be invisible.

In what I now write I must take care not only that you, the reader, should be unable to identify any real individual, but that not even the patients themselves should be able to do so; so I shall conceal, transpose and jumble; but every observation I make will be from a note I did record, about someone I did see.