I reckon there must be millions of Britons abusing the services provided by GPs.

For I was astounded to learn from a local GP surgery that across the year 2017 some 616 patients failed to turn up for booked doctors’ appointments there.

Added to that 494 people didn’t keep appointments with nurses at the same practice.

If one does a simple, but unscientific, national extrapolation of those numbers, with some 9,275 GP practices in the United Kingdom, some 5.7million people did not turn up for doctors’ appointments last year and 4.5million did not arrive for appointments with nurses.

Apart from the disruption which such behaviour causes in medical practices, there will be a great waste of time by receptionists who will have booked each appointment and by medical staff who will have read up any notes on each patient before the time of each booked appointment.

Surely penalties must be introduced to bring a halt to such a dreadful waste of NHS resources.

RON KIRBY
Dorchester