Shropshire Doctors Co-operative Ltd (Shropdoc) is a not for profit organisation established in 1996. Shropdoc has 279 local GP members who deliver out-of-hours care to a population of 600,000 patients within Shropshire,Telford &Wrekin and Powys.
The service opening times are from 18.30 until 08.00 Monday to Thursday and 18.30 Friday through to 08.00 Monday with 24 hour cover for all bank holidays.
Shropdoc provides care to approximately 140,000 patients per year.
Shropdoc currently has six centres in England. We visited the two largest centres during this inspection at Telford and Shrewsbury alongside the head office location where virtually all triage takes place.Shropdoc primary care centres are located within community or district hospital sites.
Shropdoc operates a ‘triage’ model where all patients have clinical telephone assessments. This prevents unnecessary journeys for patients and enables appropriate coordination of home visits and appointments according to clinical urgency and demand. Shropdoc does not use decision supporting software for assessing patients, all clinical decisions are based on evidence based knowledge and clinical guidelines for best practice.
We found patients accessing the service were kept safe and protected from harm. Care and support was delivered to patients by a caring team who were responsive to the changing needs of the patients.
We found policies and procedures to support staff whilst carrying out their roles were robust and up to date. Staff had all received appropriate training to carry out their roles.
We spoke with patients, parents attending with children, staff, the senior management team, looked at feedback from local healthwatch organisations and collected comments cards from the public at each of the locations visited. We also listened to call handlers and triage consultations with patients and observed consultations being carried out at the care centres.
Feedback from patients suggested they were happy with the care they had accessed, were treated with dignity and in a sensitive manner.
We found that the service was well-led and managed by an enthusiastic, experienced and knowledgeable senior management team, and their values and behaviours were shared by staff.