North Yorkshire has biggest increase in two-week GP appointment waits in last year

Health and Social Care spokesperson Helen Morgan MP called for patients to be given a legal right to see a GP within seven days or 24-hours if in urgent need.

One in 10 waits for GP appointments were longer than a month in some areas with a record 20.5 million waits of at least 28 days or longer last year, the research found.

Across the North East and Yorkshire, more than one in five waits for an appointment took more than two weeks in 2024.

North Yorkshire had the biggest rise in waits taking more than two weeks - a 36 per cent increase from 2023 to 2024.

While in the East Riding of Yorkshire and Sheffield almost one in 10 appointment waits took more than a month.

By contrast, in York, just 3.8 per cent of patients waited over 28 days to see their GP.

Ms Morgan said: “These figures reveal a stark postcode lottery that is leaving people in vast swathes of the country without the care they deserve.

“Many already in pain are being forced into anxiety-inducing waits that only add to their suffering and leave them at risk of not getting the treatment they need in time.

“Time and again the Conservatives broke their promises to patients and ran our local health services into the ground but it is now the Labour government not showing nearly enough ambition to break this cycle of misery.

“If we are going to give communities the local health care that they need, we have to go further and faster. That means giving patients a legal right to see their GP within a week by ensuring there are 8,000 more GPs.”

It comes as the Health Secretary pledged that the 8am scramble for GP appointments will be “wildly different” before the next general election.

Wes Streeting said that he would be out of a job if people’s experience of getting a GP appointment had not improved before July 2029.

He told LBC: “It is going to take time. We’ve just actually done a deal with GPs with a new contract, the first time that’s happened since the pandemic, and that will ensure that everyone in every part of the country can access services online, including appointment booking.”

Ministers announced on Tuesday that an extra 1,503 GPs have been recruited since October last year.

Mr Streeting added: “When NHS waiting lists fell five months on the trot, including peak winter pressures, I was keen to do two things: firstly, to tell the public that it is improving; but also to reassure people we’re not complacent – there’s still more than seven million people on NHS waiting lists, so there is still a mountain to climb.

“Similarly, today, I want to reassure people that we’ve not only delivered the 1,000 more GPS we promised by the end of March, we’ve gone even further – but also reassure people that we know there is much more to do to make sure that everyone can get a GP appointment when they need one.”