Off the record: out of hours under pressure

  The increasingly severe pressures facing OOH (out-of-hours) GP services in Northern Ireland were laid bare during the festive period. On numerous occasions over the Christmas and New Year period, just one GP was left covering the ‘red eye’ shifts for the whole of the Southern Health and Social Care Trust, which serves a population of some 300,000 in a largely rural area — as a result of chronic shortages of GPs. Callers with serious acute health issues, such as those requiring palliative care, are being caught up in a backlog of calls, with less urgent patients having to wait up to 12 hours at times for a GP to call back if only one is covering the service at the time. Frances O’Hagan, a GP based in Armagh who regularly covers GP OOH services for the Southern Trust, says: ‘Even with two GPs covering that size of an area, the time it takes to get from one call to another can be massive — up to a 60-mile journey one way in some cases. 'You also have to factor in the time it takes to see patients and covering the calls made to the OOH line itself.’ The chronic shortage of GPs has led to the complete collapse of some practices in the Republic of Ireland and the rest of the UK, leaving patients facing the potential scenario of having no GP cover in normal daytime hours, never mind during the OOH shift of midnight-8am. It is predicted that Northern Ireland could be heading the same way. GP indemnity also poses a stumbling block to ...
Source: BMA News - Category: UK Health Source Type: news