South East Health - Out of hours medical care, Primary care health services

Telephone Contact With Us

When you are through to the out of hours service a call operator will talk to you first. They will treat you politely and with courtesy and respect throughout the call. 

The call operator is trained to obtain details from you about the healthcare problem. If the details you give indicate that another service is appropriate then they will provide you with contact details. We call this Signposting. Otherwise they will pass you to one of our qualified nurses who will need to gain more detailed information from you. The nurse will either:

• give you advice directly, or
• advise you that you need to visit our surgery base in order to be seen by our out of hours doctor or nurse practitioner in a face to face consultation, and will give you details of where this surgery base is located, or
• advise you that you need to have further advice from a doctor, and will arrange for you to receive an advice call from one of our out of hours doctors within a specified time, or
• decide that you need to be seen urgently at the hospital Accident and Emergency centre, and will therefore transfer you to the ambulance service, or advise you that you need to receive a home visit from our out of hours doctor, and will arrange this to occur

Advice Call

The out of hours doctor or nurse practitioner will follow up your contact with our call centre, if this has been agreed with you. He/she will telephone you within the specified time. If for any reason he/she is unavoidably delayed in being able to telephone you, the call centre will tell you and will agree a revised time limit with you.

Visiting the Surgery Base

When you first arrive, please be prepared to provide brief details so that the doctor or nurse practitioner can check these against the details they have received from our call centre.

Waiting for a Consultation

Please be prepared to wait for a consultation. The doctor or nurse practitioner will be handling telephone advice calls to patients, as well as conducting face to face consultations. Occasionally you may find that a patient who has not been waiting as long as you will be seen before you. This will be because the doctor or nurse practitioner has considered the likely clinical urgency of each visiting patient and has decided that this particular patient was likely to require more urgent attention.

Waiting for a Home Visit

Because of the wide geographical area we cover, our home visiting doctors may sometimes be delayed.  When this occurs our call centre will contact you to keep you informed and to advise you of the doctors estimated time of arrival.

The Consultation

Please be prepared to discuss your health problem in some detail with the doctor or nurse practitioner. He/she will want to verify the information he has received from the call centre, and may need to ask you further questions to be as sure as possible that the advice or medication or referral that you are given is the most effective action.

Medication

The on-call doctor may prescribe some medication. He/she will advise you as to when you need to start taking this medication, the dosage you need to take and the frequency at which you need to take it.  The on-call service stocks a range of medication which has been identified as the most commonly needed medicine out of hours.

If the doctor prescribes some medicine within this range of stocked medication he/she will issue you with a full course immediately. If you are exempt from prescription charges you must be able to prove this (e.g. Prescription Pricing Authority card). If you are not exempt or you are unable to provide proof you must either:-

• pay the full prescription charge immediately, or
• sign a promissory note

Satisfaction

South East Health always strives to meet the needs of all its service users. If you are less than satisfied with some aspect of our service, please mention this at the time of your contact with us. It may be that there has been a minor misunderstanding or a failure of communication which can be put right straight away. All South East Health staff, both clinical and non-clinical, are empowered to put things right on the spot .  This might if appropriate  be in the form of a simple acknowledgement that we had got something wrong, together with an apology.

Suggestions

We are proud to deliver a cost effective and efficient service.
However we continually look for ways in which we can improve our service. This need not be in the form of a major change – sometimes a little alteration or extra makes a big difference. We would welcome your views and suggestions.

If you put these in writing to us we will

• guarantee to send you an acknowledgement
• guarantee that we will consider your view and suggestions. (sometimes there may be operational or other reasons why we cannot incorporate your suggestion into the way we work)

Complaints

Please click here to find out about our complaints procedure.

Contact Us

Please click here for information about contacting us.

Maps

Please click here for addresses of our clinical bases.