A primary care case or a medical emergency?
A DOCTOR who will be working all day on Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year's Day has sought to raise awareness of about an on-call primary care service which takes over to provide GP cover when surgeries are closed.
Known as the Out of Hours GP Service, the system is based at the Princess Elizabeth Hospital in the Primary Care Centre near the Emergency Department, and is staffed by five experienced GPs who work on a rota basis.
It is operational between 6pm to 8am the following morning on weeknights, and from noon on Saturday until 8am on Monday.
It also provides cover on bank holidays, including Christmas Day, Boxing Day and New Year’s Day. Clinical lead Dr Silvana McCaffrey will be on duty over Christmas.
To access the service, patients are asked to ring their normal GP surgery, from where their call will be diverted to a receptionist at the PEH monitoring the service.
The receptionist will take the patient’s contact details and a brief description of their issue, before offering a consultation via telephone, face-to-face at the hospital, or at home.
The service is able to access a patient’s records via their regular surgery’s system, ensuring that the duty GP is fully briefed prior to a consultation.
Dr McCaffrey said that while the PCC worked closely with the Emergency Department, the ED had become increasingly specialised over the years, which meant it was necessary for both departments to be separated.
‘We are close to each other, but we do slightly different things,’ she said.
‘ED is much more interventional, so we couldn’t do their job, but they don’t know everything about our job.’
She said the only question people needed to ask themselves when thinking about accessing the service was whether they would ordinarily ring their surgery if it was open.
‘We purposely avoid using the word “urgent”, because it means different things to different people.’
‘The only decision people need to make is whether they need to talk to someone before Monday, or whenever their surgery is next open.’
The service does not offer scheduled appointment times, with Dr McCaffrey saying that estimates of when people could be seen were offered instead once their preferred type of consultation was determined.
‘If it’s a busy day, what we’ll say is “look, we’ve got a few people ahead of you, give us two hours and we will see you as soon as we can’’.’
‘We can’t give a precise appointment because we don’t know how busy we will be.’
She hoped that, by publicising the system, a balance was struck between people having the information they needed but not overloading the service.
‘We’re trying to say quite actively that we are a continuation of your practice,’ she said.
‘We can pick up an issue that can’t wait until you can next access your surgery, and we have access to all the notes we need.’
The cost of each type of consultation for those aged over 18 varies, with the cheapest being a telephone consultation at all times except between 11pm to 8am Monday to Sunday, which costs £75.
The most expensive consultation is a home visit between 11pm to 8am Monday to Sunday, which costs £282.
All consultations for under-18s are priced at £25.
