Urgent or primary care

Healthwatch Wigan and Leigh held face to face semi structured interviews with people attending children's A&E, main A&E waiting area, Primary Care Centre and Leigh Walk-in Centre across 5 half day sessions in August and September 2018.

The interviews were held to investigate the deciding factors that had led the patients to attend A&E or the Walk-in Centre and to explore the level of understanding patients had about 'out of hours', 'extended hours' and 111 services.

A large proportion of the 68 respondents had attended the services for an injury. Two thirds of the people had contacted another health site or health professional before attending A&E, the walk-in centre or the primary care centre; the responses were evenly split between GP, another service and none. Furthermore, there was a similar amount of people who were directed and not directed to attend an urgent care service by a clinician.

The report identifies a number of key issues in the area including: difficulties with GP access, failing to contact a primary care service due to the assumption of GP surgery closure on bank holidays, long waiting times to access the NHS 111 service and inadequate support from the NHS 111 service.

The report made the following recommendations: NHS 111 commissioners need to ensure that NHS 111 have the skills to help patients navigate to the right services, phone numbers for GP out of hours service should be promoted widely, and a mechanism-such as training- is needed to prevent GPs referring patients to the wrong service .