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Out of Hours GP Services in Bolton
NHS Bolton has full confidence in the GP out of hours service it commissions and provides for the people of Bolton.
The service performs above the national average in terms of meeting requirements for speed of response, and in terms of patient satisfaction.
Our staffing has been worked out to meet the level of demand while meeting national requirements and our own high standards of quality and risk management. If demand is higher we can very quickly increase the staffing, through robust standby arrangements. We also plan higher GP numbers when we anticipate high demand, for example during the peak of the swine flu pandemic.
NHS Bolton’s Director of Primary Care Provision, Anna Basford said : “We have worked very hard in Bolton to ensure that we have a responsive, high quality out of hours GP service which meets or exceeds national requirements. Given the very small number of calls dealt with overnight, having a single GP on duty is a safe and effective way of providing primary care during the midnight to 8am period.”
Between midnight and 8am there are an average of just over 14 calls a night. Most of these patients can be cared for with telephone advice. Only one or two require home visits and around four are seen at the Out of Hours base.*
Between midnight and 8am the service meets the national standard of a full clinical assessment by the GP for 95% of urgent patients within 20 minutes, and non-urgent patients within one hour. Patients with life threatening conditions are diverted to 999 services immediately.
The national survey of GP services carried out by IPSOS MORI showed that 71% of Bolton patients thought the out of hours service was good or very good, compared to the national average of 66%.
The Bolton service has recently been positively assessed in a national benchmarking study of these services.
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