From 19 May 2015 – 10 July 2015, we looked at how urgent care in North Tyneside can be improved and we listened to find out your views.
We now want to share this feedback with you. If you have any further comments on any of the research below, you can contact us here.
Key documents
Right care, time and place – final report
Final report from how to spend the urgent care pound
Supporting information
These are the sources of information we have used to compile the full report. Please note we have removed any personal information.
Raw data from urgent care listening
For a full list of supporting information please click here.
What we’re trying to achieve
We want to provide the best possible patient care in our community and over the last few months we have been working hard to develop our vision for urgent care.
Our aim is to develop a successful and long-lasting model of care which supports self-care, helps people with urgent care needs to get the right advice or treatment in the right place, first time, provide a highly responsive urgent care service outside of hospital so people no longer choose to queue in A&E, and ensure people are treated in speciality centres.
In summary, for people with urgent but non-life threatening needs:
- We should provide highly responsive, effective, personalised services out of hospitals
- Deliver care in or as close to people’s homes as possible
For people with more serious or life threatening emergency needs:
- We should ensure that they are treated in centres with the best possible expertise and facilities to reduce risk and maximise changes of survival and good recovery
To make all this happen, we have focused on seven key areas. These are:
- Better support for people to self-care (look after themselves)
- Helping people with urgent care needs to get the right advice first time
- Providing more responsive urgent care services out of hospital
- Ensuring that serious and life threatening conditions are treated in the right facilities with the right expertise
- Connecting urgent and emergency care services together
- Providing high quality and affordable care within the resources available
- Making sure that all the services are integrated
If you would like to read more about the pre-consultation, you can read the listening document or there’s more detail about this in the case for change:
Urgent care explained
The phase ‘urgent care’ means any form of medical care that you need quickly that does not require a hospital stay or visit to accident or emergency (A&E). So for example, you have a minor injury, or a sudden onset of an illness that you might see a pharmacies, nurse of GP for medical or treatment.
The services that we’re going to be looking at include:
- How you can look after yourself (self-care)
- NHS 111 – the non-emergency telephone number for NHS services
- GP practices
- GP out of hours (for when GP practices are shut)
- Community pharmacies (or chemists)
- Walk-in services
- Ambulance/emergency departments
We are thinking about how the services relate to A&E and 999 emergency ambulances services and how they are being used in North Tyneside.
We realise that for many people, the words urgent care can be really confusing as we know that when someone has an urgent health need, that this can be an emergency.
What happens next
We’ll be using this information to inform the different scenarios for change which are subject to formal NHS consultation, this is due to start in October 2015.