Strengthening primary and community care services - the foundation for most care and treatment
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Healthwatch England undertook an analysis of its feedback to inform the future of the NHS primary care and community services. They analysed feedback from 4,665 people.
Some of the key barriers to accessing care are consistent across a range of primary and community services:
1. Appointment availability.
Across all the services on which we reviewed our data we found the lack of appointment availability to be a key barrier to access.
2. Contacting services. Whether it be by phone or online, we repeatedly heard that both primary and community services can be hard to contact, and therefore hard to access.
3. Opening hours. Many services’ hours of operation are not conducive to being universally accessible.
4. Remote methods. Services are increasingly offering people the option to access services remotely, but many people find this neither accessible nor desirable.
5. Access costs. Accessing services is not necessarily free. We hear about the cost of transport to services as being a significant barrier for some people. The cost of making repeated calls or spending significant time waiting on the phone to services can also be a barrier.