The GP appointment data for December has now been published.
The data shows that there was a drop of just over 1.25m appointments from November to December (from 25m to 23.7m) but that is a significantly smaller drop than for November – December 2019 (26.8m to 23.5m), and there was an increase of around 170,000 appointments in December 2020 compared to the previous year.
Waiting times also appear to have dropped compared to the same period in the previous year, with the number of appointments within 7 days up by 1.9m in December 2020 compared to December 2019, and appointments over 8 days down by 1.76m.
This shows the incredible achievement of general practice with 100% of appointments in December 2020 as December 2019, in addition to launching and running the vaccination programme.