EDITORIAL
Out of hours care
Out of hours care in the community; a shambles or work in progress?
Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
G Hughes
The Emergency Department, Royal Adelaide Hospital, North Terrace, Adelaide 5000, Australia; cchdhb@yahoo.com
Keywords: out of hours care; community; weekend cover; general practitioners
| The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below. |
In the first week of May the National Audit Office (NAO) published a report on out of hours care provided by primary care trusts (PCTs) in England.1 You may have missed the story in the media; it came at the time of local government elections, a cabinet reshuffle, and Rooney’s metatarsal. Media reports described the service as a shambles.
In 2004 about 90% of PCTs in England became responsible for providing night and weekend cover as general practitioners (GPs) gave up an area of practice they had been responsible and accountable for since the dawn of the National Health Service. The NAO report measures the performance of the new system against several quality targets. Among other results, only 2% of services answered a phone call from the public within 60 seconds; only 8% of urgent cases were assessed within 20 minutes; only 15% of emergency face-to-face
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