Cumbria Health on Call Ltd (CHOC) provided GP out of hours' services and also a day time bi weekly cardiology clinic at the Hilltop Heights location. We did not inspect the cardiology service during our visit, this will be inspected separately. At this inspection, at the main office location, our focus was upon looking at the provision of urgent primary health care services across Cumbria and how the service monitored and assessed the quality of the service it provided and managed any identified risks. We saw that the services activities were subject to continuous monitoring and review.We visited the office and spoke with the people involved in different but vital parts of the patient pathway. We met, spoke with and spent time with the managing director, senior clinical manager, the operations manager, control room manager, triage and control room staff. All the people we spoke with and spent time with were well aware of their responsibilities and what was expected of them to provide a responsive and effective service. All of these people were able to answer our questions to a high level and provide us with the data we requested in a variety of forms, electronic, hard copy, statistical and through explanation of the IT system.
The non clinical call handlers we talked with had been trained to enable them to follow the most effective criteria to gather information and to identify whether a patient had an immediately life threatening condition (ILTC).