That's pretty common these days. Stretched resources 'n' that. I think it helps with people not showing up to longstanding appointments too, which is a big problem for them. Seems to work pretty well at our surgery, so long as you don't mind which doctor you see, but we're pretty lucky in that all of our GPs are good c***s. I've been registered at surgeries before when there was one doctor who was worth seeing, but you'd try and dinghy the others even if you'd just had your leg hacked off.
My favourite was the weirdo who would literally yell at everyone for being overweight, no matter the complaint or whether or not they were actually fat. You could hear the mentalist through the walls in the waiting room. He eventually disappeared when it turned out he'd been asking the female patients out on dates. I know this because he apparently gave my mother a lecture about how he'd been told to break off his romantic relationships with patients, and that she was going to have to see one of the other doctors from then on as she'd been one of them. He'd never even propositioned her, but obviously couldn't remember who he'd been seeing