A ten-minute appointment has room for one problem, briefly. Thirty minutes has room for the problem behind the problem — the sleep behind the blood pressure, the worry behind the palpitations, the second question a patient only asks with a hand on the door. It has room for a proper examination instead of a precautionary referral, and for explaining a diagnosis until it is actually understood. Our own audit bears it out: last year we referred roughly a third fewer patients onward than the national average for general practice — not because we gatekeep, but because more gets finished in the room.

We book eleven appointments per clinician per day and hold two of them for same-day illness. It is deliberately fewer than the room could take, and it is why the average wait beyond your booked time last quarter was four minutes. If we ever run more than fifteen minutes late, reception tells you before you have to ask, and the appointment comes off your invoice. That policy has cost us £855 since 2011 — which is rather the point.

Hollybank House is a Victorian stone villa with a sage-green door, and we have resisted every temptation to make it look like a clinic. The waiting room is a sitting room — armchairs, the day’s papers, decent coffee, and a noticeboard carrying our own audit results next to the flu poster. There is no glass hatch: reception is a desk, with a person behind it who will have taken your call that morning. Both consulting rooms are on the ground floor, the diagnostic suite sits at the back overlooking the garden, and the stairs lead only to the office — nobody’s appointment depends on managing them. Patients tell us the building does half the reassuring before a clinician says a word, which is exactly what we hoped when we chose a house instead of a unit.