Urgent Health Care in Wakefield District

Between September 2023 and November 2023 Healthwatch Wakefield carried out engagement through a survey, a focus group and one to one interviews. The aim of the engagement was to understand people’s knowledge and experiences of using urgent health care services, including calling an ambulance, in Wakefield District. 124 people completed the survey, a further four people took part in a focus group discussion and eight people took part in one to one interviews. Twenty-one survey respondents were classed as being in a ‘low-income group’ based on their answer to the question asking if they had been in a low-income household, or homeless, over the last two years. Following is a summary of the findings.

Survey respondents in the low-income group were much less likely to class themselves as being in ‘good’ or ‘excellent’ health and were twice as likely to say they had ‘poor’ health. 

People had a good overall knowledge of local urgent health care services when presented with the options. However, when asked to come up with the options themselves, most people just talked about the ambulance service, A&E and NHS 111. The least well known services were urgent mental health services, Pontefract Urgent Treatment Centre and NHS 111 online. 

When asked which service they would be most likely to contact or attend if they had an urgent health concern, the top responses were NHS 111 followed by GP. The low income group were less likely to choose ‘attend A&E in person’ and ‘call 999 for an ambulance’. Those aged 65+ were more likely to contact their GP than to use NHS 111. 

Several reasons were given for how the decision to contact an urgent health care service was made. The top reasons were ‘based on the severity of the problem’ and ‘based on the day or time of day’. This was similar when filtered for low income and also by age. 

Overall, around 25% of survey respondents had called an ambulance at least once in the last two years compared with 40% of respondents in the low income group. 

The most important factors for people when deciding which urgent health care service to contact were that they were able to see a health professional that day and that the service was open out of hours. Being easy to get to and easy to park were also important. People in the low-income group were more likely to say that lack of transport and the service being easy to get to by public transport was important to them. 

Individual discussions brought out the issue of age, with people feeling that in general, older people are more reluctant to call an ambulance or attend A&E than younger people.

The general feeling was that people do not have enough knowledge and information about the range of urgent health care services across the district. o A variety of ways of getting this information across were suggested including educating young people in schools, leaflets and posters, advertising and articles in newspapers, information promoted in GP practices and A&E waiting areas and social media.