Doctors vow out of hours service will improve from April

Chippenham based Wiltshire Medical Services (WMS) has been awarded the contract by NHS Wiltshire to run the out of hours service across the county.

WMS has been providing out of hours cover for the past five years in Kennet, North and West Wiltshire but from April 1, will cover the rest of the county.

Previously there were five different providers of out of hours care, but NHS Wiltshire wanted one provider for the county.

WMS will have eight bases where doctors and nurses are either based or can meet patients who need urgent care.

These are at Trowbridge Hospital, Savernake Hospital, Chippenham Hospital, Salisbury Hospital, Amesbury Health Centre, Shaftesbury Hospital and two new sites, Warminster Hospital and Great Western Hospital, Swindon.

WMS was set up by a group of Wiltshire GPs and doctors from other practices work shifts with the service.

Founding directors of WMS include Dr Andrew Cowie of The Porch Surgery in Corsham and Dr Jamie Brosch of the Hathaway Surgery in Chippenham.

Dr Cowie said: “I genuinely believe the quality of service we will offer will be better because of the spread of the service. We will be providing two additional locations where GPs have bases.

“We don’t use any locum doctors. We have never used a locum or agency doctors and we have no intention of doing that. Out manpower is made up almost exclusively of local GPs who either live or work in Wiltshire.

“We vet all our doctors very carefully and we are confident they are of the highest quality. We will have increased capacity for visiting patients at home across the county.”

Concern was expressed at a meeting of Wiltshire Council’s health and adult social care select committee about the location of the bases for WMS’s doctors, including Devizes which does not have a base.

WMS did have a base at Devizes Hospital at weekends for about two years but this ceased when the wards closed two years ago.

Dr Cowie said Devizes had been considered as a base but said even when doctors were based at Devizes Hospital the number of patients seen was low.

Dr Cowie said: “Wiltshire is very challenging because of its rurality and there is simply not the resource to have a centre everywhere people would like.

“We appreciate that it means people in and around Devizes are having to travel but they have a choice of locations to go to in Chippenham, Trowbridge, Amesbury or Savernake, all of which are a little bit away but not huge distances.”

Savernake Hospital will continue to be a base on weekend days but not on weekday evenings, when demand is extremely low, but doctors could still meet patients there.

Dr Cowie said: “People think there are doctors at Savernake all the time but there isn’t. We have spent a huge amount of effort trying to improve the service for the residents of Kennet as a whole.”

Dr Cowie said the Great Western Hospital was chosen as a site to offer more opportunities for people living in Wootton Bassett, who currently are seen at Chippenham Hospital, and those who live in eastern Wiltshire.

He said Warminster Hospital will be used as a base at weekends to take pressure off Trowbridge Hospital, which is extremely busy.

People who need to contact a GP out of office hours can ring their surgery where they will be told the number to ring (0300 1115717) or automatically diverted.