"Unacceptable GP appointments time scale"

This is a village in North east wales 6miles SW of Wrexham called Ruabon, Our medical centre here employs about five doctors and a number of staff, how many it is impossible to tell due to the building layout.

When telephoning the surgery to make an appointment, the automatic answering option service goes into automatic delay mode, and puts you on hold, saying: "We are experiencing a high number of calls and your call will be answered as soon as a receptionist is available". This has a normal time scale of around 4.5 minutes.

I am a person who will see the first available doctor, I have no preferences to any particular GP yet today the first available GP appointment isn't for another 9 days! Now if there was a high number of area illnesses this could be understandable but on passing the village medical centre (where there is good visibility of the waiting room), a high majority of the time there are 70% of the waiting room seats empty.

For a new medical centre, that is less than half a mile to the A483 dual carriage way, with 4 to 5 GPs, and a surgery that normally has a 70% empty seating capacity at appointment times - this delay seems unacceptable. The system here does not appear to be logical.