I've gotta say my GPs were great before and they're great now. Referrals to specialists, which a family members have needed, had a painfully slow start, leading to prolonged and severe pain until they finally got into the system. Since then, they've been amazing.
The relative in question is housebound and so they were doing some telephone consultations with them already before the pandemic. However, they were very generous with the home visits, the relative got weekly visits from the district nurses during the pandemic, and now they're stable, the GP will still visit if they think they need to. On the borderline suspicion of emergency, they had her in ambulatory care the same afternoon, three more appointments for scans within the 10 days that followed, and for the latter two, the relative booked their own hospital transport so I wouldn't need to go with them.
One day, the GP surgery rang us up to ask if they could come round and give the relative their flu shot. I asked them to do the whole household, and they did.
I'm much happier with phone consultations anyway, and I certainly wouldn't want to have to constantly schlep a relative with limited mobility to the surgery, where there's limited parking and what there is is perilous to back into.
As for me, the way I found out I had prediabetes was that I rang up about a seemingly trivial, but strangely persistent cosmetic problem that was still there months after stopping a particular medication. The GP asked me to see them in person the same day, did all the blood tests, and a week later, got me to book a telephone consultation to explain that I had prediabetes. They were even perfectly happy to treat the cosmetic problem I presented with, even though it was, in fact, trivial and unrelated to the prediabetes.
Another good thing about telemedicine: I had a lesion on my leg which the GP had previously said was benign, but it seemed to be growing. Talked to GP, sent pictures over on their SMS service, and got a routine referral to dermatology four months later. I show up to dermatology, get seen within 5 minutes of my appointment time, and they confirm that it is 100% benign and I will never need to worry about it again as long as I live.
It hasn't always been this good. I have a genuine horror story from the early 2000s which I won't talk about here. But the quality of communication is critical to the quality of service (at that time, they were still using couriers to transfer scan results between hospitals in different cities, which I don't think they do as much now), and in that respect, I think opening more channels for communication has only improved matters.
I acknowledge that we must be extremely lucky with our local authority, and the GP service in particular. I think a lot of other places, and maybe some surgeries in the same area, don't operate like the well-oiled machine that we've been enjoying. I would absolutely never argue that my household's experience cancels out someone else's. I do, however, think that telemedicine is a great way to augment the efficiency of an already efficient system.