Consult and Challenge Meeting
On Wednesday 8th November, Healthwatch Southampton was invited to attend a Consult and Challenge meeting. This group of professionals, service users and organisations in the voluntary sector have monthly meetings to discuss plans for the city and ensure that disabled people are involved in all decisions that affect them, from ground to government level.
We were joined by Jess Yorke and Robert Hansford from the Primary Care Team. They talked to us about the enhanced and urgent access to primary care services which they are currently developing: an integrated service between Southampton hubs (i.e. GP surgeries) and the out-of-hours service. The aim of this project is to nationally integrate urgency services, make the 111 service more clinically focused and have only 1 triage process rather than multiple ones. The new digital infrastructure will integrate the different clinical systems more effectively, such as the 111 service and GP surgeries for example, through enabling operators for the 111 service to directly book an individual an appointment at a local primary care hub. Other changes will include hubs being open until 9pm for non-urgent appointments, which will then free-up the earlier appointments for urgent cases.
The Primary Care Team have taken the opportunity to gather information from the public to inform their work. They have created a survey which investigates what kind of contact with a health professional the public would expect, depending on what kind of treatment they need (for example, if it is an urgent problem, a routine appointment or a regular appointment for a long-term condition, whether they would expect a same day face to face appointment, a convenient face to face appointment, a same day telephone or video consultation etc.). The survey also investigated what times would be convenient for people to have a non-urgent appointment in the evening and asked what other factors the public thought should be considered when deciding locations for centres in which evening and weekend appointments would take place. So far, they have received 558 responses, but are hoping to get more. Healthwatch Southampton plans to play a part in disseminating this survey via our website, and other representatives of community groups also offered to help gather more responses – we will update you once we are able to post this survey on our website!