He is right there is a delay to accessing primary care services at the weekend, and it is far easier to visit A&E, even if that is not what the official advice is. The response is that GP's should be open at weekends.
We should recognise that having GPs open at weekends will probably not significantly change the number of patients in A&E, what you need is a change in the carrot.
If I believe as a patient that I have an emergency, or want an instant answer to my health problem at a point convenient to me then I will go to A&E. I will not want an appointment in the afternoon, I will probably have other things I want to do then.
The only apparent way to fix this is to turn the GP surgery into an open walk in access, or relocate them into A&E and let the triage nurse feed their patient list.
We have tried over many years to educate people on which point to access the nhs, however this has been without success, everyone knows A&E is open though, maybe we should stop trying to create other access points to the system and properly resource trg one that everyone uses.
Here is the original BBC article:
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