by Two hours, one very tense magazine, and a genuinely deep appreciation for whatever the NHS staff are managing to hold together on a fraction of the resources they actually need.
Two hours. Two entire hours sitting in a genuinely uncomfortable plastic chair at my local GP surgery this morning, for an appointment that was originally booked for a specific ten-minute slot, which I am fairly confident now stands as my own personal worst wait time in the several years I have been registered with this particular practice, beating out a previous record I had, until today, considered genuinely difficult to surpass.
I want to be entirely clear, writing this diary entry, that I am not remotely angry at the actual staff working there, who were, without exception, visibly run off their feet the entire time I sat waiting, moving between rooms with the specific brisk efficiency of people managing a workload that has clearly outpaced whatever the practice is actually resourced to handle comfortably. The receptionist who eventually called me through, nearly two hours after my scheduled slot, apologised genuinely and specifically, explaining, without my even asking, that they were down two doctors that morning due to illness and simply working through the full patient list with whoever remained available.
I ended up reading almost an entire magazine cover to cover during the wait, something I genuinely never do anymore given how thoroughly my phone has replaced that particular habit, and found myself, somewhere around the ninety-minute mark, having a genuinely interesting, if slightly tense, conversation with the person sitting beside me, an elderly gentleman who had been waiting even longer than I had for a considerably more pressing concern than my own fairly routine appointment, and who nonetheless remained remarkably good-humoured about the entire ordeal in a way that put my own quietly building frustration to some genuine shame.
This is not, I recognise, a novel observation, and I am aware that pieces about NHS strain get written considerably more often and considerably more expertly than anything I am likely to add here in a personal diary entry. But sitting through it directly, rather than simply reading about the underlying resourcing crisis in the abstract, does genuinely change how the whole issue lands, moving it from a policy debate I follow with appropriate professional interest into something I experienced directly, in my own body, in a specific uncomfortable plastic chair, for two entire hours this particular Tuesday morning.
The actual appointment itself, once I finally got in, lasted perhaps six minutes, efficient, competent, and entirely focused on the actual medical question I had come in for, which only sharpened the underlying contrast further: a genuinely excellent six minutes of actual care, bookended by two hours of waiting that had nothing whatsoever to do with the quality of the medicine itself and everything to do with a system stretched considerably thinner than it should reasonably be asked to operate under.
I do not have a tidy policy conclusion to offer here, since I am, in this diary at least, writing as a patient rather than as a health policy correspondent. What I do have is a rather more visceral appreciation than I held before this morning for exactly what the people working inside that system are managing to hold together, on considerably fewer resources than the job genuinely requires, and a renewed, entirely earned patience for the next time I find myself waiting considerably longer than any appointment booking ever promised.
The elderly gentleman I ended up chatting with for most of the wait, before he was finally called through himself, mentioned, almost in passing, that he has been attending this same surgery for well over three decades now, long enough to have watched the waiting room itself change considerably, both physically and in terms of how long a typical wait has come to stretch across the years he has been observing it. He was not bitter about it, exactly, simply matter-of-fact in the specific way I think only comes from genuinely long personal experience watching a system gradually change shape around you, a perspective I found myself thinking about for the rest of the day considerably more than I expected to when the conversation first started.
I asked him, before he was finally called through, whether he had ever considered switching practices given how long the waits have apparently grown over the years, and he simply shrugged and said the staff here know him properly by now, understand his particular history without him having to re-explain it from scratch every visit, a kind of continuity he clearly valued considerably more than the theoretical convenience of a shorter wait somewhere less familiar. That struck me as a genuinely useful reframing of the whole trade-off, one I had not properly considered before this morning’s considerably longer than usual wait finally gave me the two hours required to actually think it through properly.
Walking home afterward, appointment finally complete, I found myself thinking about how differently this same two-hour wait would have landed on a day when I had somewhere urgent to be, a deadline I could not move, a childcare arrangement hanging on a specific pickup time. I had, today, the genuine luxury of a flexible schedule and a job that tolerated me simply texting my editor to say I would be in slightly later than planned. Not everyone waiting in that same room this morning had that same flexibility, and I suspect the actual cost of a system stretched this thin falls, in practice, considerably harder on exactly the people least equipped to absorb an unplanned two-hour gap in their day.
More from this author at Vivienne Pratfall, prat.uk.
