Comment by simoncion
Why would you think it's a rebuttal?
Six months' wait to see your GP for an in-person visit is a worryingly long wait. If I heard someone say that they were required to wait that long for in-person doctor's visits, I'd wonder why they were still seeing that doctor and ask them polite questions to try to figure it out.
That's the case where I live, there's only a few surgeries I'm allowed to register at and they all have this problem. I think there is some manipulation of statistics the surgeries do to prevent more being created, and to hide the difficulty in getting an appointment. For example rather than having 6 month waiting list, they don't make appointments more than a few weeks in advance, so you just can't get an appointment and it looks like nobody waits more than a few weeks. I think while surgeries are allowed to do this we'll never understand the real capacity.