We need policies to take pressure off GP surgeries - Jeremy Balfour
Winter is always a tough time for our health services. Cold weather doesn’t just fill waiting rooms, it makes people sicker. Patients arrive in worse condition, stay longer and need more complex care.
In Edinburgh’s A&Es we are already beginning to see a familiar seasonal pattern: waiting rooms fill earlier in the day, ambulance arrivals bunch together and the queue for beds creeps steadily upward.
Cold weather inevitably worsens respiratory conditions, heart disease and frailty, driving more people to seek urgent care. But the problem isn’t simply the volume - it’s the fact that patients are presenting sicker, staying longer and requiring more complex support. When A&E becomes gridlocked, the entire hospital struggles to function.
The same patterns can be observed in GP practices, often turning an already stretched service into one operating at the very limits of its capacity.
Seasonal illnesses such as flu, respiratory infections and exacerbations of chronic conditions drive a sharp rise in patient demand, while the same cold weather increases staff sickness levels, further reducing available appointment slots.
Getting a GP appointment in Edinburgh is difficult at the best of times – in winter, it can feel near impossible. Many practices are forced to prioritise urgent, same-day cases, leaving people with long-term conditions waiting longer for essential reviews.
This surge also intensifies pressure on practice reception teams, who must balance rising call volumes, triage requests and patient frustration. As more people struggle to get timely GP care, problems that might have been managed early in the community instead escalate, increasing reliance on out-of-hours services and ultimately, adding further pressure on A&E.
While these issues are more acute during the winter months, they are by no means a purely seasonal phenomenon. They are very much present year-round, as many people with long term conditions will tell you from their regular interaction with the health service.
We need bold action from Government. For too long we have been promised plans, strategies, and recoveries that have done nothing to address the root causes of the issues.
We need policies that will take pressure off our GP surgeries, prioritise our frontline services, and modernise our NHS. The mainstream Scottish political parties have proved themselves out of ideas, and the people of Edinburgh, the Lothians, and Scotland deserve better.