Clinical Practice

How many patients can a GP actually see properly in a day?

A booking diary showing a new patient every 15 minutes looks like 15 minutes of care. It is not. The notes, the scripts, the referrals all have to fit inside that same window - and what is left for the patient is a lot less than the slot suggests.

The booking slot is not the consultation

Picture a common bulk-billing schedule: a new patient booked in on HotDoc every 15 minutes, roughly 30 patients across the day. On paper, that is 30 fifteen-minute consultations. In practice, it is 30 patients competing for a shared quarter hour that also has to cover everything the appointment generates - typing the clinical note, issuing a script, writing a referral letter, ordering pathology or imaging, updating the patient's history. None of that work disappears; it simply gets pushed into the same slot as the conversation, because the GP cannot start the next patient's appointment until it is done and the waiting room is already full.

Ask a GP working that kind of roster what is actually left for the patient once the paperwork is accounted for, and the number that comes back is rarely 15 minutes. It is commonly 5 to 7 minutes - barely enough to hear the presenting complaint, examine what is obviously wrong, and write a plan, let alone probe for the second or third issue a patient did not lead with.

What the national data says

The RACGP's Health of the Nation 2025 report found the average time GPs report spending with a patient rose to 19.7 minutes, up from 18.7 minutes in 2022 - an 11 percent increase the RACGP attributes to rising patient complexity rather than a change in the underlying funding model. That average sits well above the 5 to 7 minutes of real face time on a tightly packed 15-minute roster, which shows how much the booking pattern varies clinic to clinic. A high-volume bulk-billing schedule is not the national average - it is the sharper end of a system already under pressure.

The RACGP has separately noted that the growing volume and complexity of presentations, without a matching increase in consultation time or remuneration, is a direct driver of burnout - particularly for early-career GPs who have not yet built the systems and staff to absorb the load.

Why this matters for diagnosis, not just comfort

Shorter effective consultation time is not simply less pleasant for doctor and patient - it changes what gets caught. A patient presenting with fatigue might be describing early thyroid disease, depression, anaemia, sleep apnoea, or a dozen other things, and telling them apart properly takes a history, an exam, and time to think. Multi-system presentations, medication reviews for patients on five or more drugs, and mental health assessments all need more than a few minutes to do safely. When the slot forces a choice between finishing the notes and asking one more question, the notes usually win, because the next patient is waiting and the diary does not move.

This is not a criticism of individual GPs, who are almost always trying to do right by the patient in front of them. It is a description of what a volume-based booking system does to the time available, regardless of how skilled or conscientious the doctor is.

What changes when the slot disappears

Daytime home visiting through C.A.L.L.S is structured differently from the ground up. There is no shared 15-minute grid because there is no room-rental floor pushing toward volume, and no commission taken from the visit fee. Every home visit is booked as a full 30-minute time slot, and the GP sets the fee for the visit and keeps all of it. A 30-minute visit paid in full is enough time to take a proper history, examine the patient, and write the notes without the next booking pressing in behind it.

The arithmetic still works for the GP. Six to eight properly diagnosed 30-minute home visits a day, each billed at 150 to 350 dollars depending on complexity, can match or exceed the daily total of a 25 to 30 patient bulk-billing roster - without compressing every consultation into the gap left after the notes are done.