Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what recent estimate he has made of the average waiting time for an appointment to see a GP in (a) England and Wales and (b) Coventry.
The most recent data on the time between booking an appointment with a general practice and having the appointment (in days) for Coventry and Rugby Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) as well as for England are presented in the following table as the average over the 12 months from August 2018 to July 2019.
The data is taken from the NHS Digital publication ‘Appointments in General Practice’. This is a new experimental data collection which is still being refined and improved.
It should be noted that the ‘time from booking to appointment’ refers only to the time elapsed between the successful booking of an appointment and the appointment actually taking place. The data does not take into consideration that many patients will be appropriately booking ahead as part of the continuity of care they receive for long-term conditions.
| Coventry and Rugby CCG | England |
| Distribution of average time elapsed between booking an appointment and the appointment taking place, August 2018 to July 2019 | |
Same Day | 47% | 42% |
1 Day | 7% | 7% |
2 to 7 Days | 21% | 20% |
8 to 14 Days | 12% | 14% |
15 to 21 Days | 6% | 8% |
22 or more | 7% | 10% |
Total | 100.0% | 100.0% |
Notes: