Will walk-in GP clinics deliver one million extra appointments?

The first of 16 new walk-in clinics across Scotland where patients have access to GP-led care without an appointment is now open.

Most will operate every day from 12:00 to 20:00 and provide a range of on-the-day assessments and treatments.

It is a £34m one-year pilot project and First Minister John Swinney has said the clinics will deliver over one million additional GP and nurse appointments.

BBC Verify analysis suggests this figure needs context and there are questions over how quickly that commitment can be achieved.

Scotland's first walk-in clinic is based at the Wester Hailes Healthy Living Centre in Edinburgh.

Swinney attended the opening of the facility earlier this month, where he said it will help tackle the so-called "8am rush" for doctors' appointments.

The other 15 locations vary from an empty retail unit in East Ayrshire to the island of Benbecula in the Western Isles.

The Scottish government previously told health boards they wanted the clinics open by April but most will now be operating by the summer or later.

The centres will be for non-emergency medical problems, where patients need to be seen the same day but do not require hospital care.

However, the walk-in clinics are expected to have catchment areas and the first centre has restrictions on who can attend in this pilot phase.

Currently, it is only available to patients registered with eight local GP practices in south west Edinburgh - around 7% of the total registered patients in the NHS Lothian area.

The clinic's website suggests it is not suitable for pregnant women or children under the age of five.

Among the issues you can use the service for are rashes, coughs and throat, ear or chest infections.

But the walk-in centre is not for medical emergencies, sprains, repeat prescriptions or long-term conditions.

The walk-in clinic concept has been long established in England, where 238 opened between 2000 and 2010.

A 2014 UK government review found the clinics were very popular with patients but less so with NHS bosses and GPs, who questioned their value for money and the impact on GP surgery pressures.

The report noted that 51 had closed or been repurposed as urgent treatment centres in the previous three years.

The Scottish government argues that its project will help patients fed up with appointment delays.

GP surgeries and primary care is often referred to as the "front door" to Scotland's NHS and account for 90% of all patient contacts.

This means any delays in getting appointments at local health clinics are keenly felt by patients and it is an issue that has persisted in some areas since the Covid pandemic.

A recent Scottish government survey of more than 100,000 people found the number of people saying it was easy to contact their GP in the way wanted has fallen from 87% in 2017/18 to 76% in 2023/24.

The number of patients registered with a doctor in Scotland is increasing - up 5.1% between 2019 and last year - but the number of GP practices has fallen year-on-year over the same time period.

It dropped from 940 in 2019 to 887 in 2025, reflecting a trend towards fewer, larger practices overall.

Overall, the number of patients registered per practice grew by 11% between 2019 and 2025, while the number of patients per GP increased by 6% during the same period.

Dr Peter Cairns, who works at the GP practice next to Edinburgh's walk-in clinic, laid out the reality of meeting that demand.

He said: "In this practice population, at least 10% - perhaps 12 or 13% - of our population wants to see a GP most weeks. Realistically we only have the staffing resources to service about 7.5% of our population."

Working out how many appointments GP practices do every year is complicated.

Unlike NHS England, Public Health Scotland does not hold data on the number of GP appointments but instead records information on "encounters" - which include home visits, phone calls and surgery consultations.

Encounter figures are the closest comparable data Scotland has to the number of GP appointments.

There are about 17 million of these direct encounters every year in Scotland, including 12 million surgery consultations.

It is understood the Scottish government is putting in bespoke reporting arrangements to monitor attendance at the new walk-in clinics.

These will not be directly comparable to the existing encounters but the one million appointments, if achieved, is a sizeable increase of in-person contact.

The Scottish government has said on a number of occasions that the clinics will deliver one million additional appointments but did not initially put a timescale on this pledge.

On Tuesday, officials said the ambition for the walk-in centre pilot programme was to deliver one million extra GP and nurse appointments over the course of a year when fully up and running.

The timescale in which this is reached will depend on "when all sites are able to come onstream", they said.

Health Secretary Neil Gray told the BBC: "When the system is fully operational, when we have all sites open, that is when we're expected to have the capacity where we can offer that additional level of appointments, that estimation around a million additional appointments comes from."

Details on each clinic's capacity, and whether the Scottish government will meet that commitment, will be revealed as the exact locations are confirmed - but the BBC has some indicative data.

Dr Hayley Harris, clinical director for NHS Lothian's unscheduled care services, said that the Edinburgh walk-in centre will have one GP, one advanced practice nurse, one physio, two receptionists and one link worker.

Harris said they were hoping to be able to see up to 60 patients a day, which equates to 21,360 over a year, excluding public holidays.

The bid document for NHS Grampian's three clinics was released to the BBC under freedom of information laws and shows the board is allowing for 20‑minute long appointments due to the "risks associated with seeing unknown patients".

The report states it is planning for 90,720 patient slots a year across its three proposed sites in Aberdeen, Elgin and Peterhead, where eight GPs and three triage nurses will be among the staff hired.

The capacity of the Lothian and Grampian clinics is not yet clear.

Elsewhere, NHS Fife last month submitted plans for a walk-in clinic in Buckhaven with an annual projected appointment capacity of 64,240 - but this proposal has not yet been agreed.

Benbecula, which has a population of 1,286, will open a clinic next month that operates seven days a week, 09:00 to 17:30.

The Scottish government is pitching walk-in clinics as another way, along with the NHS 24 service, of reducing pressure on GPs.

Gray said: "Having 16 of them to begin with is a step in the right direction of broadening that access to our health service."

The £34m set aside for the project is 0.19% of the £17.6bn budget for health boards in 2026/27 - so it does not represent much of a financial gamble.

However, critics claim it does not address the point that public spending watchdog Audit Scotland has been making for years - that fundamental change in how NHS services are provided is overdue.

Dr Chris Provan, chairman of the Royal College of General Practitioners Scotland, said: "It is not clear how the 16 pilot sites will achieve the Scottish government's promise of one million appointments per year.

"Even if they did, this would represent only a marginal increase when set against the direct patient contacts GPs provide every week."

He added: "It is also important to recognise that walk-in centres experience unpredictable peaks and troughs in demand.

"In contrast, core general practices fill every appointment and typically operate at full capacity each day - something walk-ins are unlikely to match.

"The £36m investment would have a far greater impact if redirected to where it consistently delivers the best outcomes for patients - core general practice."

Provan points to long standing issues over recruitment in the primary care sector which he feels should be addressed ahead of the walk-in clinics project.

In 2017, the Scottish government pledged that by 2027 it would increase the GP workforce by 800.

Latest figures published by NHS Education for Scotland show GP headcount has grown by 197 (4%) since 2017, rising from 4,385 to 4,582, while full-time equivalent GPs (which totals part and full time staff) have increased by 71 (2%) to 3,591.5 in total.

Another way of counting GPs, which reflects the fact the workforce is a mix of both part and full-time staff, shows there has been an increase of just 71 (or 2%) over the same period.

Scottish ministers point to improvements in the last year, where the GP vacancy rate has dropped to 3.8% from 7.6% in 2024, but doubts remain over how the walk-in clinics will be staffed.

NHS Grampian points out that "uncertainty remains regarding practices' willingness to contribute staff" in its bid document.