Weekend and evening appointments: Information for practice staff
General information
The commissioning of GP services in evening and weekends is changing. As of October 1st, patients will still be able to access care, but instead of this being from each GP practice, appointments will be delivered from a hub. There will also be a different range of services available.
The paragraphs below outline more detail and are intended to help reception teams better understand the changes and support patients in accessing care.
Why is this change needed?
Currently not all practices are able to provide ‘out-of-hours’ appointments, and those that do are open on different days of the week and offer differing services. Therefore, across the North H&F population there is variation in which patients can access care, what they can access and when.
There is a ‘Weekend Plus’ service, but this was designed to be available to patients from anywhere in the Borough and does not allow us to change services to better address the specific needs of our local population.
We want to create a more equitable system, in which patients from North H&F GP practices can access care in the evening and at weekends irrespective of where they are registered. We also want to increase the range of services we can provide and have the flexibility to grow this range of services according to local need.
What we are doing
To achieve this, GP practices in the W12 area have formed a ‘Primary Care Network’ (PCN) and are working together to provide services for their combined patient lists. The practices participating in ‘North H&F PCN’ are:
- Westway Surgery
- Hammersmith & Fulham Centres for Health
- Dr Uppal & Partner
- Parkview Practice
- Canberra/ Old Oak
- Parkview Medical Centre
- Shepherd’s Bush Medical Centre
- The New Surgery
- The Medical Centre (Dr Kukar)
Any patient registered with any of the above practices will be eligible to use our evening and weekend services. Patients do not need to change their GP to do so. The range of services will grow over time, but will initially include GP face-to-face and telephone appointments, nursing services and health coaching.
There is more information on what type of care is available in these appointments in the accompanying document on GP and nursing services, but we are keen to use the evening and weekend appointments for people who cannot access care in the day (e.g. due to work commitments) or who have problems needing urgent care.
How to book and cancel appointments
Appointments will be available from 18:30-20:00 on weekdays and from 09:00-17:00 on Saturdays. There is currently no service on Sunday.
Patients can book or cancel appointments in hours by contacting their GP practice, work is underway to enable them to also be able to do this online. Outside practice hours, patients wanting details on how to book appointments can check the practice website or follow instructions on the practice answer phone system.
Practice staff can book appointments for patients using ledgers created on the North H&F (Parkview) Weekend plus SystemOne module. Practice staff are also expected to amend these ledgers for cancellations from patients on their practice lists.
All face-to-face appointments will be provided from a ‘hub’ based at Parkview Centre for Health and Wellbeing. There will be reception staff on duty and patients simply need to arrive at the site and say they have an appointment at our PCN hub.
Practices with queries about appointments can call [Insert phone number].
