Seeing the same GP

You can ask to see a particular GP, nurse or other healthcare professional at your practice, and the practice must make every effort to arrange it. How often patients actually get to see the person they prefer is one of the survey questions shown on every practice page. This guide covers both.

Your right to ask

The NHS Choice Framework says you can ask to see a particular doctor, nurse or other healthcare professional at your GP practice, and that this is a legal right. The practice must make every effort to meet your preference when you need an appointment. It may not be able to when:

• that person is on leave, or has no appointments left
• you need an urgent appointment and that person is not available straight away

If the practice cannot offer you an appointment with the person you asked for, it must tell you why. If you are not happy with the reason, or are not given one, the framework says to raise it with the practice first. If that does not settle it, you can complain to NHS England, and after that to the Parliamentary and Health Service Ombudsman. The guide to complaining has the details.

When you book, the practice may ask what you need help with, so that it can decide how soon you need to be seen and who is best placed to help (NHS website). That is a good moment to say who you would like to see.

How often patients see the person they prefer

In the 2026 GP Patient Survey, 31.2% of patients said there is a particular healthcare professional at their practice they usually prefer to see or speak to. Of those, 41.9% said they get to see or speak to that person always, almost always or a lot of the time. That share was 39.7% in 2024.

These are figures for England as a whole, from the survey’s 2026 national report. Practices vary around them, and the practice pages on this site show each practice’s own figure.

Where to find it on this site

The question is “How often do you get to see or speak to your preferred healthcare professional when you ask to?” (question 7). On a practice page it appears as “Seeing your preferred professional”: the share of patients with a preferred professional who see or speak to them always, almost always or a lot of the time. The England figure is 41.9%.

It is asked only of patients who have a preferred professional, and answers of “I haven’t tried” are left out. So it has far fewer answers than the other questions: at the typical graded practice 33 people answered it, against 106 for the question on overall experience. Fewer answers mean a wider margin of error, which is why each question on a practice page shows its own number of answers.

We show a practice’s figure when at least 30 people answered the question, which is the case at 3,922 of the 6,090 graded practices. It is not part of our grade: since 22 October 2026 the survey part of the Practice Grade is the overall experience question alone, the measure NHS England uses. How we grade explains why.

If this matters to you when choosing

Look at the “Seeing your preferred professional” row on the practice pages near you, together with its margin of error and number of answers. Find them by postcode on the home page or through your area. When a practice has too few answers for the figure to count, ask the practice how it handles requests to see a particular person. The guide to choosing a practice covers the other things to check.