As the county’s independent health and care champion, we welcome news a new provider will run the out-of-hours GP services in the county.
Somerset Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG), the NHS organisation responsible for the planning and funding of local health services, announced today Devon Doctors Ltd would manage the county’s GP out-of-hours service.
Last April, government inspectors from the Care Quality Commission found the out-of-hours service run by current provider Vocare to be inadequate and rated the NHS 111 non-emergency phone service, also provided by Vocare, required improvement.
Emily Taylor, Healthwatch Somerset Manager, said:
“We are pleased to hear that prompt action has been taken by Somerset CCG to address the ongoing concerns with Vocare’s delivery of the out-of-hours services.
“We welcome the change to improve the out of hours service received by Somerset residents. We will be closely monitoring the public’s experiences of the new service delivered by Devon Doctors from April and invite local people to feed back to us about their experiences of using the service.”
In February, members of Somerset CCG's Governing Body, agreed to procure a new urgent care service for Somerset within the next 12 months. This new service model will be consistent with guidance issued by NHS England in August 2017.
Nick Robinson, Somerset CCG’s Chief Officer, said:
“New nationally issued guidance aims to create Integrated Urgent Care Services across England, this should deliver a more robust and responsive service to patients and Somerset CCG supports this objective.
“The procurement of the new urgent care service for Somerset will be subject to a competitive tendering process and we expect expressions of interest from any qualified service provider later this year. The current provider of service, Vocare Ltd, is able to bid to provide this new model of urgent care service if they wish.
“By mutual agreement and on an interim basis, Somerset CCG has also agreed with Vocare Ltd, to transfer the management of the county’s GP out-of-hours service to neighbouring Devon Doctors Ltd. This management transfer is expected to be completed by the end of April 2018.”
The Somerset CCG added that the development of a new urgent care service in Somerset and interim change of management for the GP out-of-hours service is not expected to inconvenience patients or the public in any way.