‘I went to lunch and 97 patients had called’
OUT-OF-HOURS GP services were overcrowded with patients over Christmas, with some areas seeing a 50% increase in calls.
These services are offered by groups of GPs working together in different regions at night and over holiday periods.
Patients attend by calling a triage nurse who assesses whether they can wait to see a GP in regular hours; should attend the service; or occasionally should call an ambulance.
SouthDoc, covering Cork and Kerry, saw a jump of 46% in calls, and the North East Doctor On Call (NEDOC) service received 5,700 calls between December 23 and January 3 – up from 5,100 in the same period last year.
Navan GP Dr Marie Scully worked at the North East service over Christmas and says she saw a record number of patients.
Describing how January 2 went for her, she said: ‘It was bedlam. We had three doctors on duty in the centre so we were seeing up to 12 patients an hour with another doing home visits. There were 60 patients on the appointment system at 10am. I took a 15 minute break for lunch and on starting work again at 2pm there were 97 patients on the system waiting to be seen.
‘By 4pm appointments were booked until 1am and for the first time ever, NEDOC could not offer further appointments.’
Dr Scully said that while this happened in the ‘out of hours’ Christmas period, limited investment in GP care is causing overcrowding problems at all times during the year.
The North East, for example, which this centre serves, has the lowest ratio of GPs to patients in the country. Dr Scully said there are a number of factors behind the increase in patient numbers.
Like many doctors she queried whether enough information is available about self-treatment for children and adults, citing the increased numbers of young children coming to surgeries and out-of-hours centres as a result of GP treatment now being free for children under the age of six.
She warned: ‘There are simply a limited number of GPs who can be rostered on to do these out of hours work. It’s a long day, it’s tiring.’
‘One patient had an appointment for after midnight and it didn’t sound serious, the notes said he had a sore throat. He was a young man, not a 91-year-old or a one-year-old. It does seem that there is poor tolerance by some patients for minor illness.’
Dr Scully called on the HSE to roll out its flu warnings campaign earlier and boost awareness of their self-treatment website, undertheweather.ie, which she said ‘most haven’t heard of’.
‘Poor tolerance of minor illnesses ’