Primary care staff at NHS Ayrshire & Arran have today been told to reduce “appropriate routine work” for three weeks as the health board battles a winter care crisis.
In an announcement this afternoon, the organisation said the move was designed to ensure GP practices are “able to prioritise urgent care.”
Today’s development comes hot on the heels of last week’s announcement that the heath board was to “pause” routine inpatient elective surgery for a period of three weeks- from Monday 9 January.
According to today’s announcement routine work to be reduced includes “chronic disease management reviews” and “patient surveillance checks.”
Other primary care and community services will “continue as normal.”
A spokesperson for NHS Ayrshire & Arran said that demand for primary care and community services has “never been higher” in the region.
The spokesperson continued: “In order to match this demand, primary care services across Ayrshire and Arran are seeing more patients each day than ever before.
“The primary care and community teams are working exceptionally hard over extended hours to try and ensure that the communities they serve receive high quality and safe care.”
Dr Crawford McGuffie, Medical Director at NHS Ayrshire & Arran said: “With such high demand, it is often necessary to triage (or sort into order) the patient contacts to ensure that the sicker patients are prioritised.
“This also may result in some delays to phone call connection and we ask our citizens to be patient in the face of this high demand.
“Colleagues are working tirelessly to get to your call.”
An NHS spokesperson said: “The role that primary care and community-based professionals offer, beyond the daily demand for emergency and urgent reviews of new patients, includes a considerable number of patients who are cared for in their own home, preventing an avoidable transfer of a patient to hospital.
“Any avoidable transfer to hospital, when the current prevalence of flu and covid is high, helps protect each patient and each hospital as they respond to emergency care needs.
“This support from primary care and the community directly supports the running of our hospitals, and is also safer and more comfortable for the patient.
“We have asked our primary care colleagues to reduce appropriate routine work for three weeks, while appreciating the additional work this winter period creates.
“Routine work includes chronic disease management reviews and patient surveillance checks. Other primary care and community services will continue as normal."
Dr McGuffie added: “This will ensure GP practices are able to prioritise urgent care, palliative care, screening programmes and out of hours services, as well as being able to provide care for those with more complex care needs.
“We would like to thank our staff working across the whole system for their help and understanding as we continue to work under extremely difficult circumstances.”
Meanwhile, new figures show GPs in NHS Ayrshire & Arran conducted 250,000 patient reviews last month.
The figures show that 75 per cent of those reviews (187,500) were carried out face to face in December 2022.
When you compare the figures to pre-pandemic stats (2019), they show that more patients are being seen by their General Practitioner.
Figures for December 2019 show that 193,000 reviews were carried out- with 82 per cent of them (158,260) conducted face to face.
You can find out more about the work of the primary care teams by watching this short video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=72x7UDOU7OA
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