It is not as simple as attributing it to GPs taking "long weekends off."

15 Oct 2021 | Full Fact's weekly news
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FACT CHECK
Daily Mail report on GPs seeing fewer patients on Fridays needs more context
An article in the Daily Mail, published as part of the newspaper’s ongoing Let’s See GPs Face to Face campaign, has claimed that GPs treat on average 200,000 fewer patients overall per day on Fridays compared to Mondays.

The article appears to link this difference with the changing work patterns of GPs, saying that it comes “as the surging number of part-time GPs enjoy long weekends off”.

But this is less about Fridays being quiet, and more about Mondays being busy. Comparing Friday with other days of the week, the difference is much less.

And GPs holding fewer appointments on a Friday is nothing new. Data from the past three years shows that, if anything, the gap between the number of appointments held on a Monday and a Friday is actually narrowing slightly.

So it does not appear that fewer appointments on a Friday is a new phenomenon, or one that can necessarily be linked to any recent increase in the number of part-time GPs taking long weekends off.

Some GPs argue that fewer appointments take place on a Friday not because of less supply from GPs - but because there’s less patient demand. The situation is certainly not as simple as the Mail makes out.
GP patient figures in context ([link removed])
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REPORT
UK public as concerned by the spread of misinformation as immigration and Brexit and the EU ([link removed])

Earlier this year, in collaboration with Ipsos MORI, Full Fact set out to better understand public opinion on bad information and the damage it does.

Our research found that the UK public is as concerned by the spread of misinformation as it is by issues such as immigration and Brexit.

Our data shows levels of public concern were comparable to fair wages and low pay, crime, law and order, Brexit, the Common Market and the EU and immigration.

We also found when specifically asked if they are worried about the spread of misinformation, 3 in 4 UK adults agreed, and that more people see the spread of misinformation as a top issue in the UK than taxation.

Concerning results ([link removed])
FACT CHECK
MailOnline muddles professorship ethnicity figures ([link removed])

A MailOnline article claimed that research had found that black people hold 3.5% of professor posts in British universities. But this confuses the facts and isn’t true.

In 2018/19, The Royal Society found that 3.5% of black academic staff working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) were professors - not that 3.5% of professors were black. By comparison 11.9% of white academic staff working in STEM were professors.

The Royal Society’s figures show that of the 11,895 STEM academics working at the F1 Professor level with a known ethnicity, just 65 (0.5%) were black.

While parts of MailOnline’s report may have given the impression that black people are slightly overrepresented among UK professors, the truth is they are significantly underrepresented.

We’re grateful to MailOnline for promptly correcting its article after we explained the issue.

Ethnicity and academia ([link removed])
FACT CHECK
Most police have not been found guilty of sexual misconduct ([link removed])

On BBC Radio Scotland’s Good Morning Scotland programme, Aisha Gill, Professor of Criminology at the University of Roehampton, said that most police officers had been found guilty of sexual misconduct while wearing uniform.

A reader asked us to look into this claim.

We contacted Professor Gill, who confirmed that she had meant to use a different statistic: that 52% of police officers who were found to have committed sexual misconduct kept their jobs.

This figure seems to originate from a Byline Times report in September, which claimed that 43 out of 83 Metropolitan Police officers kept their jobs after being found to have committed sexual misconduct between 2017 and 2020.

While we’ve not assessed the Byline Times’s statistics, it’s clear they do not refer to the proportion of police officers found to have committed sexual misconduct.

Figures mix-up ([link removed])
MORE FACT CHECKS
Also this week...
* A ‘Guardian’ headline about the Insulate Britain protests is fake ([link removed])
* An Australian professor didn’t say Covid jabs aren’t vaccines ([link removed])
* Boris Johnson claim about HGV driver visas sparks confusion ([link removed])
* No evidence New South Wales Premier resigned over bribes from Pfizer or AstraZeneca ([link removed])

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