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Follow on Google News |  GP survey reveals concerns about out of hours careA survey of 1,000 GPs has identified concerns that out of hours care is being hindered by a lack of integration with in-hours services and insufficient resources to consistently provide high quality care.
By: Care UK The commission discovered that: * 59 per cent of GPs surveyed agreed that out of hours GP services are not a high enough priority for the NHS. * 57 per cent of GPs feel the NHS isn’t giving enough attention to out of hours GP services. * 49 per cent feel there is sufficient integration between out of hours and in-hours GP services. * 46 per cent felt out of hours services in their local area have sufficient resources to provide high quality care. * 46 per cent say concerns about the costs of medical indemnity have led them to avoid or give up out of hours work. In its report, Urgent and important: the future for urgent care in a 24/7 NHS (http://www.careuk.com/ * The NHS should develop a “single system integrator” role responsible for evaluating quality, monitoring adverse events and ensuring clear lines of communication and transparency across urgent care providers. * System-wide patient-focused quality standards would encourage better working between organisations – currently out of hours National Quality Requirements are separate and leave doctors isolated from the rest of the system. * Perverse financial incentives in contracting and tariffs that prevent GPs and A&E emergency services from working together need to be tackled. Hospitals should be better integrated with out of hours providers to ensure a holistic service offering for the community. * To prevent out of hours services from being an afterthought, commissioning needs a better quality framework focused on due diligence; longer term contracts and provision of support and training to build a quality workforce. * Sharing of care records between NHS service providers requires a national specification but locally developed IT systems. Roll out should be supported by a national education programme to help patients understand how their data will be used and by whom. Professor David Colin-Thomé, who chaired the commission, said: “As the NHS strives to make a seven-day week a reality, there remains a lag in how it provides round-the-clock care in the community. Out of hours services have too often been treated as an ‘add-on’. If they are better integrated with hospitals and emergency services, then a lot of people who currently spend hours sitting in A&E could be treated at home or get much quicker access to specialist care. NHS England has signalled an eagerness to break down hospital/community barriers in the recent Five Year Forward View (http://www.england.nhs.uk/ Care UK supported the commission by bringing together experts from across the urgent care field and creating a forum for the exchange of ideas. Dr Marjorie Gillespie, primary care medical director at Care UK, said: “The commission found consensus about the challenges providers and individual doctors’ face in delivering out of hours services. There was also an encouraging degree of agreement about the changes that are needed to create a better integrated system that incentivises clinicians, rather than discouraging them, to work within out of hours care. “Care UK has learnt a lot from the work undertaken by the commission and will be able to reflect this in our own services (http://www.careuk.com/ Care UK is England’s largest independent sector provider of NHS 111 and urgent care services. The organisation is commissioned to run 12 NHS 111 services handling 185,000 calls each month and 19 out of hours services that serve over 10 million people. Visit careuk.com/futureforurgentcare (http://www.careuk.com/ End
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