Despite nurses' protestations that they are the caring, patient-friendly heart of the NHS, any doctor will tell you that at the first sign of a cold or a falling-out with their line manager they're off to bed with a hot-water bottle to watch re-runs of Casualty on UKTV Gold. So much for self-sacrifice.

But they are beaten into a distant runners-up spot in the sickie stakes by call-centre staff who spend so little time on the job that it's a surprise they can find their way back to the office. According to data from the Office for National Statistics, they take twice as much sick leave as Mr and Ms Average; in any given week 5per cent of them will phone in sick, that's assuming that they can get through.

Call-centre workers are no sicker than the rest of us. In fact they're generally young and physically fit. They reckon they're entitled to duvet days to cope with “stress”. Listen people, answering the phone and bullshitting for ten minutes about mobile phone contracts or car insurance premiums is not stressful.

Neither is nursing, yet they shamelessly award themselves unofficial “mental health leave” to deal with the ordeal of passing the buck up the food chain 24/7. How many nurses does it take to change a light bulb? None, they just write “Light bulb broken. doctor informed” in the diary.

GPs behave differently. We know that if we don't show up, patients still expect to be seen and sorted. Sleeping in and dumping extra work on to our colleagues isn't an option, especially as we're supposed to know what drugs to take to stay awake (amphetamines), numb that tickly throat (cocaine), and ease those horrid flu-ey aches and pains (heroin). So we simply dose ourselves up, turn up to work and cough over everybody in the waiting room.

This is payback time for the long winter months that you lot spend sneezing and puking over us while we tell you for the umpteenth time that a course of antibiotics will probably make you feel worse rather than better. But even when we're at a low ebb and can't be arsed to argue the toss we can still make you believe that you've scored some sort of victory when we hand over a prescription.

This gets you out of the room, but don't be fooled. There isn't a doctor alive who can't figure out which particular antibiotic is most likely to give a stroppy punter an additional portion of nausea, diarrhoea or thrush to make them feel even more miserable.

We even insist, without a shred of evidence to support either assertion, that bolshie patients must stop drinking alcohol and finish the entire seven-day course to maximise their suffering.

Call-centre staff don't have anything like as much fun. Not even the one who froze a bloke's bank account and changed his identity details to mark him down as a destitute middle-aged Ugandan divorcé in revenge for a bad feedback report. He may be a living legend among his peers, but he's probably an unemployed living legend. It's hard not to feel sympathy. To paraphrase the late Sid Vicious, call centres have to deal with the Man in the Street, and he's an expletive deleted.

I feel their pain. I won't bore you with the details but it's now virtually impossible to book an urgent appointment at many GP surgeries without speaking to a doctor first - and some days that doctor is me, complete with headset.

The deal is that Joe Public gets a six-minute phone call to make his case. I have eight appointments to allocate to people who actually ought to be seen. I've never used more than two. Once the only patient who needed to be examined was already on a bus on her way to work when I called back. Not a nurse or a call-centre worker, obviously.

But I can see why organisations rely on baffling “press the star key” user menus to deter people from pestering them about trivia.

Like the bloke who rang to complain that he'd been ringing the number on our practice leaflet, 0800-1830, and all he got was “number unobtainable”. “Sir, they're our opening hours ...”

Dr Copperfield is a GP in Essex. He also writes for Pulse magazine and pulsetoday.co.uk

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