Reader bigjon999 has drawn our attention to a Guardian report yesterday suggesting a real crisis in access to GPs in England and Wales:
‘More than one in three patients has to wait at least a week to see a GP, and one in seven cannot get an appointment for between two and four weeks. Research suggests that general practice is at “breaking point” as rising demand forces 34% of people to wait a week or more for a consultation. A survey of 4,022 adults in England, Wales and Scotland, who form a cross-section of the population, found that 17% get an appointment within one to two weeks, 11% face a wait of two to three weeks, 4% wait three to four weeks and 2% cannot get one for at least four weeks.’
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2020/feb/22/a-third-of-patients-wait-a-week-or-more-to-see-a-gp
Based on a Scottish survey published in July 2019, we can see that while overall levels of satisfaction with the quality of the service offered by GPs did not differ significantly, it is in the ease of access that the Scottish system seems to be performing much better with 93% reporting 2-day access:
Talking-up Scotland / Scottish media fact checking is like shooting fish in a barrel 
Your normal scrupulous standards appear to have slipped here… Where did the 83% headline figure come from?
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Your normally high arithmetical skills appear to have gone missing here.
Take the 17% get an appointment within one to two weeks from 100% to get 83%?
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How is this consistent with your secondary headline which states that one third of patients have to wait a week or more. Surely this means two thirds have to wait less than a week.
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Good point. The Guardian headline is inconsistent with its own data in the paragraph below?
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The grauniad report refers to england Wales and Scotland. If 8.5% of the survey are in Scotland, extracting these respondents, all of whom would have an appointment within two weeks suggests that 92.5% in england and Wales wait more than a week for an appointment.
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Caught again. Want a job as our Numeracy Correspondent? Salary SFA rates.
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When you hear the phrase “UK-wide common framework” think of Scotland’s health service being levelled down to England’s standard.
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