A friendly chat with your GP about your life, health and happiness was once a key part of the UKâs family doctor service.
But most GPs no longer have time to have pastoral conversations, because they are too busy dealing with the countryâs rising tide of illness, research reveals.
Three out of four family doctors are now too time-pressed to talk to patients in depth about how they might stop smoking, lose weight or get more sleep, the Royal College of GPs has found.
Intense demands and ten-minute appointment slots mean they also miss opportunities to discuss taking more exercise with patients or review their medications to see if they still need to be on them.
The time to explore patientsâ circumstances more fully and offer healthy living advice has been squeezed out of family doctorsâ busy schedules, the head of the college said.
An RCGP survey of 2,316 GPs across the UK found that 75% had too little time to offer preventative healthcare, such as offering lifestyle advice and administering vaccinations. The results have raised concern about the governmentâs drive for the NHS â especially GPs â to do more to prevent people getting ill in the first place. One health expert called them alarming.
The collegeâs president, Prof Victoria Tzortziou Brown, who is a GP in east London, said: âGeneral practice is dealing with enormous demand, so in a busy consultation we inevitably have to prioritise the problems that most need our attention that day.
âWe will always act on symptoms or findings that need investigation or treatment. What can be squeezed out is the time to step back and look more holistically at how we can help that patient stay well in the long term.
âThat might mean having a proper conversation with someone who smokes. We will of course advise patients about stopping smoking. But in a busy consultation there may not be enough time to explore in depth whether they want to stop, what has made it difficult in the past, what concerns they have and what support or treatment might work best for them.
âIt is often the depth of those conversations, rather than simply identifying a risk and giving brief advice, that requires time.â
GPs already deliver important preventative care every day, she said. But âthe reality is that when youâre working in a busy surgery, with a long list of patients to be seen, there isnât always enough time in consultations to go beyond the issue a patient has come in for that dayâ.
The chief executive of the Kingâs Fund health thinktank, Sarah Woolnough, said: âWith life expectancy in the UK among the lowest of most comparable countries, these findings are alarming as many GPs say they are too overwhelmed to carry out these important interventions, and may be missing conditions that could be treated earlier.
âGPs are often frustrated that the increasing demands for appointments mean they donât have time to provide the holistic care they were trained for.â
The RCGP makes clear in its report that the NHS needs to employ more GPs and ensure they have more time with patients in order to fulfil the prevention ambition.
The findings raise questions about ministersâ plan to make the NHS in England move âfrom sickness to preventionâ in how it operates â one of the three âbig shiftsâ outlined in the governmentâs ten-year health plan last year.
âTalk around shifting from sickness to prevention is meaningless if we cannot get these basics right first,â Woolnough said.
âIf the government is serious on prevention, then more action is needed to support and enable GPs to consistently catch conditions and ill-health early, keeping people healthier for longer, and reducing pressures on wider NHS services down the line.â
A separate representative survey of 2,000 UK voters which the pollsters Censuswide undertook for the RCGP showed that 64% of the public trust family doctors to offer advice on healthy living. That was more than trust the NHS website (51%), pharmacists (38%), family and friends (22%), AI chatbots (7%) and social media influencers (5%).
