A GP appointment in the Netherlands lasts about ten minutes on average. That is not disinterest and not a character flaw, it is how the schedule is built. A review of 67 countries put the Netherlands at around 10 minutes per appointment, somewhere between 48 seconds in Bangladesh and 22.5 minutes in Sweden (PMID 29118053).
Ten minutes is very little for a complaint that has been dragging for six months. Certainly when that complaint is vague, moves with your cycle, or does not fit in one word.
So this piece is about those ten minutes themselves. Not about how you convince your GP, but about what you bring so the two of you get further together. Why women's complaints are more often left sitting is in the women's health gap: why symptoms are missed.
Why does a ten minute appointment shape so much?
Ten minutes has to carry everything: your story, the physical examination, the thinking, and the agreement about what happens next. That is a rostering choice in the Dutch care system, not a choice your GP made. Knowing that changes how you prepare, because the question stops being how you get more time and becomes what enters the time you have.
That 67-country review pooled 179 studies and more than 28 million consultations. The Netherlands appeared three times, at 9.93 minutes in 1987, 9.81 in 2001 and 10.2 in 2002 (PMID 29118053). So the ten minutes are not a recent cost-cutting story, they have been there for decades.
Now the part that surprised me when I read it. In England, researchers filmed 440 consultations across 13 practices and afterwards asked patients about their experience. Longer consultations did not score better on communication, trust or satisfaction (PMID 27777231).
That is an awkward result, including for an article like this one. Minutes alone apparently do not repair a conversation. The researchers did put something next to it: for careful investigation and safety, more time may well be needed.
My takeaway from that is simple. Do not only ask for time, bring better information. One sharp sentence from you is worth more than five extra minutes of vagueness.
What do you write down before you go?
Write down what you notice, since when, how often it happens, how bad it is and what it stops you doing. Note what makes it better or worse, and where it falls in your cycle. Thuisarts.nl, the patient site of the Dutch College of General Practitioners (NHG), advises writing your questions down so you forget nothing.
The NHG tells GPs exactly the same thing: encourage patients to write their questions down. So writing your symptoms down is not a sign of distrust. It is what the profession itself recommends.
Imagine you are in a 10 minute appointment and you have 3 complaints that all feel important. Without a note you choose on the spot, under time pressure, and you usually choose the easiest one. With a note you already made that choice calmly at home.
The difference sits mostly in how concrete you are. Compare these columns, because this is where most of those ten minutes leak away.
| Vague phrasing | Why it stalls | Specific phrasing |
|---|---|---|
| "I am tired" | Fatigue fits hundreds of things, there is no way in | "I sleep 8 hours and since February I nearly fall asleep at my desk at 15.00 every day" |
| "My period is heavy" | Heavy is a feeling, not a measure | "On day 2 I change a tampon every hour and I have stayed home 3 times this year" |
| "I do not feel like myself" | There is no pattern and no timeline in it | "I cry the 3 days before my period for no reason, every cycle, since last year" |
| "I hurt everywhere" | Too broad to hang an investigation on | "My hands and knees are stiff for 30 minutes in the morning, then it eases" |
| "It will pass" | The complaint drops out of the appointment | "It has been 4 months and I notice it on the stairs" |
Look at the right-hand column. Every sentence holds a number, a moment or a consequence. Those are the hooks your GP can hang an investigation on.
Bring your medication too, including over-the-counter products and supplements nobody prescribed. Thuisarts asks about those explicitly. Do not forget the pill or a hormonal coil, because they colour your cycle story.
How do you ask for a double appointment?
You simply ask while you are booking. Tell the assistant you have several complaints or that you want a longer conversation, and she will schedule a double appointment. Thuisarts names 20 minutes for that instead of the usual ten. Plenty of people just do not know this is possible.
This is probably the most useful sentence in the whole piece. Asking for a double appointment is not a favour and not an exception, it is a scheduling option practices offer themselves. You need no diagnosis for it, only a reason.
Be concrete about that reason when you call. Not "I want to talk a bit longer", but "I have two complaints that I think belong together and I want to discuss them in one go". Assistants schedule on exactly that kind of sentence.
There is a limit, and it is a fair one. Twenty minutes does not stretch forever either, and many practices hold that at most two larger complaints fit inside. If more is going on, spread it across several appointments and say that more is waiting.
Lead with your biggest worry, not your smallest
Say in the first minute what worries you most and what you hope to get from the appointment. Many people save their real question for the end, when their hand is already on the door handle. By then the time is gone, and that question is exactly the one left sitting.
Thuisarts puts it briefly: you can also say what you expect from your doctor. So do not only name your complaint, name your goal. "I want to know whether this fits menopause or whether something else is going on" steers an appointment very differently from "I am tired".
Name your worry even when it sounds frightening. If you are afraid of your thyroid or of something worse, say it out loud. That is not drama, that is information, because your GP then knows which question is actually on the table.
I see that order flipped out of politeness all the time. You start with the small thing so you do not seem whiny, and the big thing never comes out. Politeness costs you your own appointment here.
Which questions to your GP actually help?
Three questions do most of the work: what are my options, what are the benefits and harms of those options, and what does that mean in my situation. They are known in the Netherlands as the 3 goede vragen and are promoted by the NHG, the GP association LHV and the Dutch patient federation, among others.
Those questions were not invented in the Netherlands. In an Australian study, trained actors walked in as patients at family practices, once with the three questions and once without. With those questions, doctors gave measurably more explanation (PMID 21831558).
The scores moved a long way: from 16.6 to 21.4 on one communication scale and from 25 to 36 on the other. Same doctors, same time, different questions. I find that hopeful, because it means your side of the conversation genuinely matters.
Add three questions that ask after the reasoning. "What does this rule out?" "What else could it be?" And the one that matters most: "when should I come back if it does not improve?"
Do watch your tone. This is not a cross-examination, it is an invitation to think out loud. Most GPs like it, because a patient who follows the reasoning comes back better prepared.
What do you agree on if it does not improve?
Ask at the end: when should I come back, and what should I watch for? That is called a vangnetadvies, and it is a standard part of Dutch general practice. It turns "let us wait and see" from a dead end into an agreement with a moment and a boundary.
The NHG uses the term in its own guidelines. The guideline on children with fever states literally that the GP gives a vangnetadvies, so a serious course is recognised in time and parents know who to contact and when.
In the literature this is called safety netting. A British review describes it as a consultation technique to communicate uncertainty, share red-flag symptoms and plan a moment for reassessment (PMID 30510099).
That same review puts a finger on something that often goes wrong. A safety net is more than one sentence at the end, it also covers the follow-up, such as how you get to hear your results. So ask as well: how will I hear the result, when, and what do I do if I hear nothing?
That last question is worth its weight. "No news is good news" is not an agreement, it is an assumption.
What can you still do afterwards?
Bring someone, write the answers down, and check later what landed in your file. Thuisarts puts it this way: together you remember more. You may bring your list of questions and write the answers next to them, so you do not have to reconstruct the conversation from memory at home.
Ask at the end for a summary in one or two sentences. Repeat it back out loud. That way you hear straight away whether you both had the same conversation.
Then take a look in your medical file. You have a right to see it and to a copy, set out in article 7:456 of the Dutch Civil Code, part of the WGBO. At the GP you can often view your data online, and viewing it costs you nothing.
What you read there sometimes explains years. If your complaint is written once while you raised it four times, you know where the conversation kept leaking. You cannot edit your file yourself, but you can ask your GP to correct or add something.
Back to the start for a moment. The ten minutes do not change because you prepare better. What changes is how much fits inside those ten minutes.
If you want to walk in with concrete values, you can have your hormones measured before you go and bring the result along. That does not replace your GP, it gives you both something to look at together. Which values are worth discussing and when is in hormone testing in women.
If no explanation turns up after all of it, SOLK: what the diagnosis means helps you place that label. If you disagree with the conclusion, requesting a second opinion sets out how that route runs. If fatigue is your main complaint, look at always tired: which blood values to test.
Your next step, very concretely: tonight, put three lines in your phone about what you notice and since when, and ask for a double appointment when you book.
References
- Irving G, Neves AL, Dambha-Miller H, et al. International variations in primary care physician consultation time: a systematic review of 67 countries. BMJ Open. 2017;7(10):e017902. PMID 29118053.
- Elmore N, Burt J, Abel G, et al. Investigating the relationship between consultation length and patient experience: a cross-sectional study in primary care. Br J Gen Pract. 2016;66(653):e896-e903. PMID 27777231.
- Shepherd HL, Barratt A, Trevena LJ, et al. Three questions that patients can ask to improve the quality of information physicians give about treatment options: a cross-over trial. Patient Educ Couns. 2011;84(3):379-385. PMID 21831558.
- Jones D, Dunn L, Watt I, Macleod U. Safety netting for primary care: evidence from a literature review. Br J Gen Pract. 2019;69(678):e70-e79. PMID 30510099.
- Thuisarts (NHG). Going to the GP: what can I do beforehand and what can I expect? Accessed July 2026. thuisarts.nl
- NHG. Consultation preparation by the patient. Accessed July 2026. nhg.org
- NHG guideline Children with fever. Vangnetadvies. Accessed July 2026. richtlijnen.nhg.org
- Patiëntenfederatie Nederland, NHG, LHV and the Federation of Medical Specialists. 3 goede vragen. Accessed July 2026. 3goedevragen.nl
- WGBO, Dutch Civil Code article 7:456 (right to see your medical file). Accessed July 2026.
Every blood test result at Lunara includes a professional assessment by a BIG-registered doctor. For treatment decisions, discuss your results with your GP.
Author
