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Voters are unhappier with the NHS than they've been for 30 years.

As a GP, I feel the same, by Gavin Francis.

On an ordinary Tuesday morning, I arrived at my GP practice for a day's work.

It was 8.30am, and the receptionist on duty was a colleague named Nicola.

Any dramas? I asked her as I approached the desk. Not yet, but as early. She said, with a rye laugh.

From the moment the phones begin to ring in the morning, until they hand over to the

evening service at 6pm, practice receptionists are at the front line of the health service,

bearing the brunt of patients anger, disappointment and frustrations with the NHS.

A couple of years ago, I stopped saying, good morning, I began to experiment with alternative

more optimistic greens. It's going to be a Tuesday of happiness, I said to Nicola as I stopped at

the desk. Let's hope so, she replied. I left a cup of tea cooling as I switched on the computer,

which runs on an old operating system and usually takes a few minutes to get going.

The GP computer systems don't talk to the hospital systems, and clinicians often feel as if they're

drowning in passwords and glitches. Some parts of the NHS still use pages and

until very recently, fax machines. Most of us are trying to provide medical care fit for the

2020s, with computer systems better suited to the 1990s. There were two letters with hand written

posted notes laid over my computer keyboard, urgent messages left by colleagues for me to action

today. Modern healthcare is so complicated that no one case or story could capture all the

...