Last year an extra 135,000 GP appointments were offered to patients across Walsall between the months of January and November.

But while the figures indicate GP services were ‘moving in the right direction’, Walsall councillors say improvements still need to be made. 

Out of the extra appointments offered, 75 percent were face-to-face, a small proportion were home visits and the rest were telephone appointments.

Pip Mayo, representing the NHS Black Country Integrated Care Board, said there’s 25 new staff members engaging in direct patient care, seven of which are GPs. 

The latest figures were heard at Walsall Council’s social care and health scrutiny meeting on Thursday January 23. While the positive figures were warmly welcomed, several councillors shared personal experiences, along with those of residents in their wards, that painted a different picture. 

Councillor Waheed Rasab said: “The NHS is great and we fully understand the pressures, but it still needs a lot of improvement, mainly the GP service. 

“When they say to you that they’ll call you back, sometimes you don’t receive the call and sometimes they withhold the number. I don’t answer calls with a withheld number. One resident, an 87-year-old, said she rang the GP 31 times and couldn’t get an appointment. That is the real problem.”

Councillor Amanda Parkes added: “My doctor’s practice is in the Walsall area. If you don’t go there and stand outside at 8am in the morning, you can’t get an appointment, especially on a Monday.”

Councillor Vera Waters shared her own experience with the NHS: “I can say, personally, that when a resident comes up to me saying they have problems with getting an appointment at the doctors, I know it is perfectly true. There was one gentleman in the doctors, in his 90s. He came to ask if he could have an appointment. The receptionist said, ‘I can’t book you one now, can we phone you back this afternoon’.”

General practitioner Dr Harinder Baggri was shocked to hear about the experiences. He said: “GPs have had huge issues. The main issue is poor communication between secondary care and primary care providers. Looking at the actual patient data, the appointment levels have gone up.

However, since covid, the complexity of our patients has hugely increased.”

Pip Mayo added: “I think across all NHS services, we are struggling with the level of funding we are receiving. We are seeing greater need coming through, more complexity and more people than we did pre-covid, and unfortunately the amount of funding hasn’t kept pace with that.

“We’re trying to do as much as we can through all services with the financial envelopes that we’ve got. I recognise there can be a disconnect between what we think we’re doing strategically and what people are seeing on the ground. Getting feedback during the process is really important to help us understand how well things are landing and to move in the right direction with a really difficult funding situation.”