The Minister for Health, Samantha Sacramento, notes the concerns raised by members of the public regarding the availability of GP appointments and the effectiveness of the PCC telephone system since the announcement of the increased availability of face-to-face appointments last week, which resulted in a high demand for appointments. The Minister requested an investigation into this issue.

Since the announcement of face to face appointments, there has been a tremendous volume of calls to the PCC. To help deal with the additional volume of calls a number of officers from other Government Departments have already been deployed to cope with the high volume of telephone issues in the meantime, while the system is reviewed in depth.

The investigation has confirmed that during the past two weeks a high number of GPs have been away from work and15 GPs were not available. Whereas there is an existing agreement that only 5 GPs out of the 28 contracted should be unavailable from the PCC at any given time, last week.

8.5 GPs were away for Annual Leave, the remainder were on sick leave, off duty due to being on call or deployed and the vaccination centre.

It is also true that there has been an influx in the number of people calling to see a doctor as Gibraltar has moved out of lockdown and this in itself has created a considerable backlog, which now needs to be managed. Furthermore, the problem has been worsened by the frequency of Bank Holidays over the last 2 weeks, meaning that less clinics were available than normal.

This has resulted in the non-availability of medical appointments for a culmination of reasons. However, the statistics for the month of April show that nearly eight thousand patients were seen by GPs. On the week commencing 5 April, 1887 appointments were made, 2428 in the week commencing 12 April, 2067 in the week commencing 19 April and 1582 in the week of 26 April.

The Government and the GHA would like to apologise to those persons who are still waiting their turn to see a GP. The Minister for Heath and the GHA management are now working on proposals to increase the number of appointments that will be made available to the public on a daily basis.

The Minister for Health, Samantha Sacramento, said: ‘The team at the GHA have worked very hard throughout the pandemic, with their leave being cancelled. It must also be remembered that PCC Staff are also deployed to the Vaccination Centre that is still operational. It is unfortunate that when we moved to increase the number of face to face appointments two weeks ago, various factors have come together which have led to a service to the public being compromised which I do not find acceptable and l apologise for this. As such, I requested an investigation and I have met with the Medical Director to ensure that this does not happen again. We need to realise that there is no 'switch' we can flick that moves from a 'pandemic' setting to 'normal'. We have to properly calibrate how our services are reintroduced to ensure that we are providing what the public need in access to primary health care, in which we have invested more than any Government in our history.’

ENDS