Our Services
Since 2004 Shropdoc has actively pursued a policy of developing a 24/7 function by utilising both its people and facilities to provide health related support services such as:
The delivery of GP Out of Hours Services care is Shropdoc’s core provision and provides services to patients residing in Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin and Powys, who need urgent referral to a GP or primary care professional when their GP practice is closed.
The service operates weekdays between 1800-0830 and 24 hours across the weekends and Bank Holidays. This means that Shropdoc is responsible for GP patients 72% of the year.
Patients should access our GP Out of Hours services, via 111, where a call handler will undertake an initial triage to identify the best service to meet the patient need and, where appropriate, electronically pass the patient details to Shropdoc who aim to respond directly to the patient within an allocated timeframe (i.e. according to need).
Shropdoc’s clinical model of care is via a trusted clinical assessor, who may be a GP, Advanced Care Practitioner, Paramedic or Nurse. The appropriate clinician will contact the patient and make a local assessment of need and either provide advice and self-care, prescription, face to face consultation or onward referral to the most appropriate local service.
Should a face to face appointment be required, patients are asked to attend one of our 9 Primary Care Centres located across Shropshire, Telford and Wrekin and Powys. If the clinical condition does not enable the patient to attend a base, Shropdoc will attend for a home visit where a driver and clinician will attend the home address in a Shropdoc vehicle. All face to face appointments will be pre-booked via our call centre. There is NO walk in provision at our primary care centres.
Clinicians in our bases and those who provide home visits are supported by a team of Primary Care Centre Assistants/Drivers.
Shropdoc Care Coordination Centre (CCC) commenced in 2006 and accepts referrals from GPs, paramedics and community clinicians across Shropshire, Telford & Wrekin and Powys. These referrals are made primarily during the day, however, the service can also take calls into the evenings, overnight and across the weekends.
CCC is run by both administrative and clinical staff. The main aim of the service is to support clinicians who require patients to be urgently referred to hospital or urgent community services, to do so in a timely and streamlined manner and ensuring the most appropriate care avoiding unnecessary admissions to A&E at Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and Princess Royal Hospital, Telford.
CCC also carries out a bed bureau function on behalf of Shrewsbury & Telford Hospitals (SATH) for all GP admissions.
Shropdoc provides an administration contact point for services who have staff working alone in the community. We monitor the staff movements e.g. time of arrival and departure at patient homes and follow up if the member of staff does not report in when expected. Processes are in place to contact emergency services if required.
Patients receiving treatment at the Royal Shrewsbury Hospital and across Lancashire are provided with a contact number for our 24/7 Urgent Care Practitioner (UCP) led telephone advice line. Our highly experienced clinicians use a national triage algorithm to determine how best to advise patients.
Should the patient’s condition require further intervention, the Oncology service will link directly with the patient’s acute provider of care. This is a referral only service.
To support the pandemic, Shropdoc commenced the provision of a Covid management service, providing advice, support and medication to patients referred via the national monitoring team or local GP services.
Patients are monitored electronically over the course of their illness to ensure any escalation or deterioration in symptoms are managed in a timely manner.
Several times a year some GP practices will close for half a day for training. This is really important to ensure that the whole practice team can get together to discuss challenges and developments to improve patient care.
Shropdoc provides either telephone or face to face services to cover patients from these GP Practices who require urgent care, whilst the practice is closed.
Urgent Care Practitioners (UCPs) from Shropdoc deliver a telephone triage service to some Powys practices, with a combined list size of about 26,000 patients.
The UCP is the first point of contact to those seeking on the day, urgent medical care; patients will speak to a UCP clinician from their home (or on their mobile device if they are out and about or at work).
This method of triage has proved successful in improving patient flow through the system and has been popular with patients, especially beneficial when their queries can be dealt with promptly on the telephone, rather than necessarily always having to attend the practice.
In future we are intending to expand this to offer a UCP clinician in respective practices to perform triage “in house” too. We are currently engaging with a number of practices with the potential to expand this workstream further.
