NHS Direct

NHS Direct responds to reports about GP appointment booking

09 Feb 2011

Responding to news reports that NHS Direct is planning to take over GP appointment booking, Dr Brian Gaffney, NHS Direct Medical Director, said:

“Any service that we develop would be in response to what local commissioners want, and only if we could provide a good service for patients. The main focus of our early engagement with the emerging GP consortia is to discuss different ways in which we could work together in the future.

“Early discussions we’ve had with GP consortia are about a range of telephone and web-based services we could offer, to support practices and meet the needs of people who want to access healthcare differently.

“These talks are distinct from discussions with local commissioners about NHS 111. The specification for the roll-out of the 111 service is being developed by the NHS in partnership with the Department of Health, for NHS Direct, along with other providers, to deliver.”

The focus of discussions has been around:

Practice/local level reporting systems

We are working with Primary Care Trusts (PCT), and increasingly GP commissioners, to share information on the types of callers to our service and the outcome of calls. We are then exploring how we can use this information to help their patients use urgent care services more appropriately.

We already provide monthly reports to PCTs that gives them more specific information about the calls we receive from people in their area (no specific patient information is provided). We are looking at producing something similar for GP practices in the next 12 months, which will look anonymously at the calls received from their practice population.

Web services

We recognise that the population is changing and people want to have alternative ways of accessing health information and advice without necessarily taking time off work to visit their GP when they could self-care. We now have a full suite of online health and symptom checkers which give patients the opportunity to self assess their symptoms, and in many cases, gain self-care advice.

We can syndicate to other websites so, for example, these could sit on a practice website for their patients to self-assess and understand the intervention that is required e.g. self-care or GP appointment. We want to work with practices to refine our web services, so they are locally responsive and reflect the range of services available locally.

Management of patients with long term conditions

We already provide some local services for patients with long term conditions working closely with GP practices. We are keen to develop these services in partnership with GP commissioners.

Out-of-hours appointment booking

GP out-of-hours appointments are being booked as part of our West Yorkshire Urgent Care Service, and through the 111 services we are involved with the delivery of in East Midlands and Luton.