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NHS Ayrshire and Arran out-of-hours service 'in meltdown' due to GP shortage
A health board insider believes patients could die if changes aren't made.
The Crosshouse Hospital near Kilmarnock (Image: Getty Images)
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An NHS Ayrshire and Arran insider says a lifeline service is in meltdown due to the lack of GPs to cover shifts.
Ayrshire Urgent Care Service (AUCS), which replaced the Ayrshire Doctors On Call, is facing a staffing crisis since rebranding to include social care services in November 2017.
This week Pam Milliken, head of primary care and out-of-hours community response services, admitted struggling to find GPs to cover out-of-hours shifts and said that they are now launching a review of the service.
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Our insider said: "The service is in meltdown and it's gradually getting worse.
"I think without necessary changes that people could die if they're not seen by a doctor.
"I think the public will be really upset and disgusted at what the service has been reduced to.
"It's getting dangerous now. People that should be being seen are not getting seen.
"The problem is that the majority of GPs don't do out-of-hours at the moment.
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"You'll get folk turning up at A&E because they can't get seen at the house. It has a massive impact on the service."
The out-of-hours service is supposed to operate through four cars and three centres, based at the Lister Centre at Crosshouse Hospital and supported by Ayrshire Central in Irvine and Ayr Hospital.
According to our source, on some evenings the service has had one available centre and one car.
The source added: "It can be one car quite regularly. It makes the paramedics a lot busier. It makes the clinical assessment unit at Ayr a lot busier too.
"Ten or 12 years ago the doctors had to do the out-of-hours and basically it was taken away from them by the government so they would just apply for shifts if they wanted.
"The way things are going, it's only a matter of time before doctors doing house visits is axed.
"I don't know what they'll replace it with but I think that it will go if they can't get GPs to cover the shifts."
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Ms Milliken said: "NHS Ayrshire and Arran and our partners in the health and social care partnerships are committed to providing a safe and efficient health service for our population.
"We work closely with our GP partners who provide general practitioner services in local communities.
"GPs not only provide healthcare in surgeries during the day. They also have the opportunity to provide GP care out of hours through AUCS. We rely on the willingness of our GP partners to undertake extra shifts to allow us to organise rotas 365 days a year.
"For a number of reasons we have been finding it more difficult to recruit GPs for out-of-hours work.
"In common with other health board areas, we have recognised that we are not achieving the same number of GPs to fulfil these shifts.
"Therefore we have begun a review of the service to look at how we can provide the safest and most sustainable service for the whole of Ayrshire."
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